Harlan Ellison - Web of the City

Rusty had to club the junkie twice, both times when Boy-O had struggled erect and tried to grab a packet from the furniture pile. The second time he almost made it, grasping a broken chair in his hands and swinging it full at Rusty. The chair connected with Rusty’s head and for a long minute everything fuzzed out gray at the edges of his sight. He stumbled in and clinched with the suddenly strong junkie and by sheer weight forced him back.

The chair came up again and grazed off Rusty’s shoulder, sending a bright lancet of pain down through his left side. The pain in his head was growing. He could see infinitely brilliant pinwheels of fire cascading down and down and then suddenly it ebbed away, and he brought up a knee straight to the junkie’s groin.

Boy-O went down, slobbering, crying, begging for a mainline pop. Rusty sank back, drawing grateful lungfuls of air, fighting away the nausea the pain brought him. He shoved all furniture up out of reach then, and waited.

It took only four hours.

Finally, Boy-O dragged himself across the floor and a crooked finger touched Rusty’s shoe. “Help me.” His voice was weak, a catch in the throat, a mere whisper, a pleading.

Then, “Okay. Okay, I’ll t-tell ya. I’ll let ya know, just gimme a shot, man, please, just one…” he sagged off into a gasp and his teeth chattered. His body shook with the effort to stay on one elbow.

“First talk. Then we’ll see,” Rusty said. He despised himself. Boy-O was a wreck.

“M-Morlan’s his name. Emil Morlan. He lives uptown. I get it through a feeder—guy supplies me an’ a pusher in Cherokee country. I n-never met this Morlan, but I f-followed the feeder once.” His mouth was a black line and the sweat was big as grapes on his upper lip. The dirt ran streakily on his face. It mixed with the blood and smelled.

“Where’s he live? What’s the address?”

“You’re killin’ me, please a shot! A shot, for Christ’s sake, I’m beggin’, beggin’ ya!”

“The address. Now. Quick!”

“Y-yeah, yeah. He lives up on Central Park West.” The junkie gave a fashionable address. “Fifteenth floor.”

Rusty moved closer. “Now you tell me, man, all this runnin’ around I been doin’, and everybody no-talk, and them threats I got to shut up—all that came from you. Right?”

Boy-O did not, could not, possibly would not answer.

Rusty waited. The shakes claimed Boy-O once more.

Trembling, he answered, finally, “Yes, god it’s s-s-so bad, so bad, help me! Gimme a pop, p-please.”

Rusty plowed forward inexorably, “You were behind it.”

“Yes, yes, I said yes, what ya want from me?”

“Why? Tell me why—”

Boy-O’s eyes rolled up and his filth-caked fingernails bit into his palms. He bit his tongue, for the snakes had come… in a moment the screams, if he didn’t get a pop.

“Answer me,” Rusty said.

Boy-O sucked air and said, “That night the Cherokees were high on tea, I’d b-brought ’em a big bundle and they got high an’ went to crash the dance. We was afraid after it was over that you was gonna tell the cops they was on pot, and throw me in the can, an’ Mr. Morlan, too. So they told me to get some p-people to keep you away. We din’t know, you know, we was a-afraid you was gonna go ta the cops, cause you was sad or somethin’.”

It was just as Rusty had supposed. Rusty repeated the address on Central Park West and Boy-O nodded. “Fifteenth floor?” Again, Boy-O agreed, then his eyes closed.

Rusty threw the pusher his clothes and the packets. He watched as Boy-O dug in a pocket for his spoon, cigarette lighter, needle. He watched for a while, and as Boy-O sank back with tight lips, a god-living expression of peace passing over his planeless face, he said softly, “If you’re lying to me, I’ll kill you, junkie. S’help me god, you’ll die.”

Then he took a length of rope from around a pile of newspapers, and bound the junkie to the furnace pipe that ran across the floor. He shoved a portion of a furniture-covering rag into the junkie’s mouth, and left him there. Along with the switchblade. Buried in the arm of an old chair—

—broken at the shank.

Forever.

A gelatinous sky, quivering with indignation at having been left to shimmer above the city. Dark as a muddy river, but moving, with storm clouds that would burst before morning, with stars that disdainfully denied all knowledge of Earth or city or the boy huddled in the bushes watching the glass and stone front of an apartment building. A city almost on the verge of sleep, with the smell of gasoline fumes in the nostrils of its inhabitants, with the clamor of late-evening beer hall denizens, with the transient swoosh of cars and buses tooling the streets to a hundred thousand destinations.

Rest and peace, of a sort, to all the inhabitants of the city, but not to Rusty Santoro. He crouched watching, waiting for a break, a nameless something to happen that would allow him to bolt across the street and gain access to the building. In his path lay a bush, a street, a door and a toady doorman, pledged with wages, steeped in snobbery, dedicated to keeping “the riff-raff’ away from the door.

Over the door, on a plate glass as clear as the light of the stars, in black script, the words SAXONY HOUSE sprawled contentedly. It was money, this place. And on the fifteenth floor, where no light showed, lived a man named Emil Morlan, a man who made his living not at stocks, or insurance, or services of a general nature, but by the dissemination of death.

Rusty Santoro waited, a leather-jacketed, blue-jeaned fury, waiting for that goddamned break so he could go up and talk to Mr. Morlan.

Oh, he wanted to talk so badly. He wanted to talk about the city Morlan did not know, about the gutters and the fat women and beer-bloated husbands, and kids in the streets, and a girl who had died in a nasty way. He wanted to talk, and he prayed to god he would not have to use his fists, because all that was through, please dear Lord, let it be through at last. But he knew it would come to that. It had to because if it wasn’t Morlan, then it was another link along the way, and when he needed the way to find the link, the only help he had lay at the ends of his arms.

He studied the front of the building, the way the architect had fused the beauty of granite with the flamboyant extremes of glass to make a wonderful façade. He studied it and thought of the future he had left behind, trailed into the slush of the gutter. Was it only a few weeks ago he had been so eager to learn the potentialities of a slide rule and protractor? Too late now. All gone like the fog of a Manhattan morning. All gone, but the man in the camel’s hair coat was still alive.

This building. A camel’s hair coat fitted this place just right. Was this the end of the trail? Seemed like.

A fat woman with a fur coat thrown over a pale blue silk nightgown, her feet thrust into mules, came clattering out of the elevator inside the building, in Rusty’s sight, and the doorman opened the glass door for her.

Rusty could not hear what they said to one another, but the woman reached into a pocket of the coat, brought out a bill and handed it to the doorman. She pointed off in the direction of lights far down at the corner, and Rusty saw a drugstore’s sign glowing. The doorman nodded, touched the brim of his cap reverently and strode off in the drugstore’s direction. The fat woman stared after him for a moment, then went back inside. The elevator door was just closing on her as Rusty got to his feet—ignoring the cramp in his legs—and strode quickly across to the building.

He was inside in a moment and looking around the lobby for a stairway. The door was a shiny metal one, and before it had sighed pneumatically closed, he had three-stepped to the third floor. He paused there to catch his breath.