Up, Out of Cities That Blow Hot and Cold Read online

  UP, OUT OF CITIES THAT BLOW HOT AND COLD

  Charlee Jacob

  Necro Publications

  — 2017 —

  | — | — |

  UP, OUT OF CITIES THAT BLOW HOT AND COLD

  © 2001, 2017 by Charlee Jacob

  Cover art © 2017 by David G. Barnett

  This edition © 2017 Necro Publications

  ISBN: 978-1-944703-42-2

  LOC: 2017908955

  Ebook formatting & cover design:

  David G. Barnett

  Fat Cat Graphic Design

  fatcatgraphicdesign.com

  Necro Publications

  5139 Maxon Terrace

  Sanford, FL 32771

  necropublications.com

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  — | — | —

  “Unreal City,

  Under the brown fog of a winter dawn…

  …I had not thought death had undone so many.”

  —T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland

  — | — | —

  It was almost a week before Christmas and Mike sat on the fire escape outside the window of his apartment. He was grading papers under the light from the street lamps, halos swirling around the glowing bulbs in a dirty lavender. He thought it meant a winter storm was coming, so much moisture in the air and the temperature dropping steadily since sunset.

  The homework had been for the students to choose something from Charles Baudelaire and write what they liked about it—or to simply put down what it made them feel. So far, he’d had eight papers on ‘The Martyr’ and about another thirteen on ‘The Metamorphosis of a Vampire’. He thought he’d explode if he were to read one more tawdry speculation or thrilled juvenility concerning men decapitating their mistresses or lamia women with strawberry mouths.

  He’d been about to burst all day, barely unable to contain some mounting sense of disquieting heat. Perhaps he was coming down with the flu and what he was experiencing was low grade fever. He’d gone outside to check the theses because he couldn’t stand the furnace’s sibilant torture anymore. It was an older building with bills-paid utilities, and the renters didn’t have individual control over the temperature. (He also roasted in the late spring until the management turned on the air conditioning.)

  He was on the last paper and was almost overjoyed—with relief—to see that one of his students had chosen an obscure piece from PARIS SPLEEN. The kid had started with a quote, as Mike had ordained when giving the assignment guidelines.

  ‘At last! I am allowed to relax in a bath of darkness! First a double turn of the key in the lock. This turn of the key will, it seems to me, increase my solitude and strengthen the barricades that, for the moment, separate me from the world.

  ‘Horrible life! Horrible city!’

  Then, as Mike read on, he discovered that all the boy had written afterward was: Paranoia, when the locks come to life; agoraphobia, as everything out there beyond the barricades stirs; thanatophobia, after even the barricades have come awake; phobophobia, by now my fear of fearing them. Horrible city!

  Mike heard someone laugh and looked around, below him to the ground, above him to the other levels of the fire escape. He saw no one. But he still heard it.

  It couldn’t have been a laugh. It was only a rasp, a grating chchuuuufffftttt! as he’d heard while passing construction sites, as bricks were rubbed together—or at demolition sites as slabs of broken concrete were laid atop one another for disposal.

  Mike glanced at the fire escape itself. It was glowing faintly. He jumped as he realized it was hot. He leaped up, snatching at the class papers, shouting “Fire! Hey, somebody, there’s a fire!”

  Because there must be one, in the building, flaming in catastrophic earnest to have heated up the fire escape’s metal.

  He started to run down to the ground level, no use going back inside his apartment where he might become trapped inside a blazing building. He realized he wasn’t burned from the metal. There were black gridmark stripes on the back of his trousers from where he’d been sitting, on the elbows of his coat where he’d rested his arms. Yet when he gingerly reached out and touched the rail, his skin remained uninjured.

  Mike blinked, still running groundward, looked toward the top of the building, sweeping his gaze down the structure’s old mortared wall until it met the earthen alley. Saw it dotted uniformly with windows. Saw no flames, no red streaks, no smoke.

  He heard the strange scraped laughter again, setting his teeth on enamel-tingling edge, penetrating down to the nerve endings in the roots. He felt the rail under his palm change shape, going smooth and oily, slithering through his hand.

  Mike cried out. He was almost to the first story and he swung himself over, off the fire escape, landing on his feet too hard. He toppled over and rolled on the cold dirt, homework papers flying. He found his knees and hands, pushing himself back up, heading for the street. At that juncture where the soil ended and the pavement began, there was a fissure in the road. Like a million that opened as summer roasted the city, spreading when the freezes came in winter.

  Mike saw a shadow climb from it, at about the same moment the snow began.

  ««—»»

  Daria was dreaming, her favorite dream of lying beside the river, green all around beneath an untroubled horizon. The man with her was smoothing cinnamon oil across her naked skin. His calloused hands were rough, causing the heat to spread even faster as he ran his fingertips up her thighs, across the plain of her belly, around her breasts. She smelled the rich spice in it and in herself, could see it gleaming on her lover in the tanness of his flesh. She wanted to take him whole into her mouth to see if he tasted of cinnamon and if he would swallow like fire.

  Out of the corner of her eye, the river’s water level was lowering, the liquid was emptying out as if through some concealed drain on the bottom. The space was being replaced with bodies, people who had perished for many reasons. There were corpses she could readily identify as gun-shot or stabbed. There were women who had died in childbirth and children who had been in car accidents and men who had wasted away from starvation. There were diabetic gangrenes and insect bites and cancers.

  She looked away for she was determined not to see this disturbing her happy dream again, as it always seemed to lately. She forced herself to glance in the other direction, toward the trees, and saw people in backless hospital gowns stumbling between them, hooked up to I.V.s and pulling the mobile intravenous around with them. She jerked her stare away from this also, gazing up at her lover. But he’d transformed, too. He hung above her, his tanned muscled body having gone to a faded pale, his chest opened with scalpel and rib spreader, the heart within shriveled and unbeating. Out of it wriggled one tiny white worm. It dangled, then pulled itself out to freefall, landing on her.

  Daria screamed and swatted at herself, trying to slap it off her, seeing more of them, a swarm of maggots. Coming awake, she found herself in the park, where she’d fallen asleep. Had she been coming from work or going to work? Being a nurse at Bon General meant she had to gear up for the holiday season, Christmas being only five days away, one of the deadliest times of the year. Sometimes there was no telling whether it was day or night because the long hours ran together with blood and liquid antibiotics.

  She st
ill rubbed her arms, feeling where the tiny white worms had landed on her skin. But she could see what it was now. She blinked quickly as she looked up at the sky, watching the snow fall.

  ««—»»

  It had been the day before Thanksgiving and Candace meant to be out shopping until after dark. Since there wasn’t that much in the way of decent stores in their little town, her husband had recommended she drive into the city, where Bloomingdale’s, Sax Fifth Avenue, and Lord and Taylor awaited.

  “Credit cards have just been paid; knock yourself out,” he’d said, giving her a peck on the cheek.

  “You’ll spoil me,” she whispered.

  “Trying to,” he replied.

  She’d been halfway there, Beemer sailing smoother than it usually did. Why had she turned back? Intuition? Deja vu? Simply the cramps that suddenly doubled her over at the steering wheel until she had to pull to the shoulder?

  She’d bitten her lip, realizing she wasn’t pregnant. She’d only missed the last one; it happened. She and Richard had been trying so hard to have a baby. How disappointed he would be.

  Then she’d gone through the front door, climbed the stairs, heard the stereo in the master bedroom playing Ravel, and found her husband in bed with Liz Schumacher.

  Candace hadn’t made a scene, even when they looked up—or rather Richard turned his head from where it rested on the pillow and Liz looked up. She’d gone absolutely empty inside, traveled the bedroom’s long wilderness to the closet, pulled down her suitcases and begun packing. And neither Richard nor Liz had said a word until the first suitcase clicked shut.

  “Candace, I didn’t expect you home this soon,” Richard said.

  “I can see that,” she replied quietly, gently placing folded sweaters in the next bag.

  “Did you have car trouble?” he said lamely.

  Liz had pulled back a little on the bed but made no attempt to cover herself. She did wipe her mouth with the back of her hand. Candace noticed how many gaudy rings studded those freckled knuckles and wondered if Richard liked for her to stick those up his rectum.

  “No, just wanted to see you,” Candace said to her husband.

  “And…?” he fumbled.

  “I believe I’ve seen enough,” she answered in an entirely too-civil tongue.

  She then summoned the maid to help her get the luggage downstairs and into the car. The maid was mortified to be in the room with both the adulterers and the wife, looking nervously from Richard to Candace as if not certain whom to obey, looking nervously at Liz as if wondering if this would be her new mistress and so she’d better not do anything to offend her.

  Candace started the Beemer again and drove down the curved white driveway, littering over with red maple leaves. She kept her mind still by trying to count the leaves as they fell.

  She ought to have reacted. Gone hot-ballistic or ice cold. But she’d done nothing of either sort. She’d always been, she supposed, entirely too passive.

  Now it was Christmas Eve. Candace looked up, just a glance in the night, wincing in sideways sleet. The cathedral spires vanished into the seemingly solid pall of low clouds. She’d seen a gargoyle move, proof of real gothic intent in the last century architecture. It freaked her out at the peripheral part of her mind that responded to such things as weather sifting through gloomy street lamps and too many strings of Christmas lights in red, making it appear as if a stone gargoyle had actually leaned down to leer at her. But she was a lot more perturbed when she looked up and realized there were no gargoyles adorning the church.

  So, what had she seen? Nothing. A lot of nothing lately. She’d have understood if she was one of the increasing number of citizens taking drugs, Eucharist of the hopeless. But apparently she didn’t need chemical inducives to catch ridiculous glimpses of shapes imprinted in or actually seeming to emerge from crumbling Doric columns, steel girders and dump site landfills. It was stress, that was all, not a prestidigitation of phylogeny—an unfolding of new organisms accomplished through unwashed mirrors and the furtive passing of ruthless hands.

  Candace hated being back in the old neighborhood. It had changed too much since she’d lived there as a child. But where could she go? Her four-year marriage to a small-town lawyer was over. And the people of that tiny place had never accepted her anyway, not even as Richard Martell’s wife. They were only too happy to see her pack up and move back to the big city she’d come out of.

  Her father had died, leaving her his dingy property. All she wanted to do was get it sold—if that was even possible—and not have to hassle any more with it or its exotic assemblage of immigrant renters. She’d never even considered the possibility that her future consisted of being a slum lord (or was that slum lady?) but, then, fifteen years ago this neighborhood wasn’t a ghetto for every non-English speaking group in the city. She wasn’t a bigot but she admitted finding it hard to communicate when there was a major language barrier. Tempers were apt to flare, theirs and hers. She’d feel her life pulse that much closer to aneurysm.

  And was it her imagination or had the whole city become worse? Candace remembered growing up with the sounds of sirens, distant gunfire, somebody always screaming someplace. But now she could positively see the slide backward into barbarism. Virulent impatience came to blows in waiting lines, average people were obsessed with revenge for some impersonal slight, and on every one-horse street to twelve lane highway was burgeoning road rage.

  Then out of the corner of her eye she’d spy a shape twisting from a sewer grate or manhole cover, a smoky eddy in its center resembling a sooty smile. But it would dissipate when she faced it head-on, denying any deliberateness of form.

  “Hey, whatchu lookin’ at?” she’d hear a hundred times as she walked down the street, spoken by some mutant either to her, to someone else, or to nobody.

  Time was, a few years back, that even the most harried people could still manage some seasonal cheer. No more, it seemed. Even Candace couldn’t squeeze out the words “Merry Christmas.”

  A group of carolers were strolling down the sidewalk. As they passed, she noticed there was one in the middle who was being held up by two others. Strings of red bulbs were emerging from under his open brushed-wool coat. Were these lights too wet and was the stench that of spilled entrails?

  Not real, she thought. I have to get a hold of myself. The man is only dressed up like a Christmas tree and has had too much to drink.

  That wasn’t the smell of spiked egg nog on his breath gusting past, not rum, not brandy or whiskey. It was… diesel exhaust, sewer belch, industrial waste spew.

  She averted her gaze—and her nostrils, trying not to see. (Watchu lookin’ at?) Her nose hairs felt singed, as if attacked by too much peppermint. The carolers—and their inebriated or injured comrade—reeled past. There was a clatter. As of the patter of the hooves of eight tiny reindeer on a roof?

  It wasn’t even the sound of bones, she couldn’t help thinking to herself. It was more the noise of tin cans in a gutter, loose shingles on a condemned roof, old aluminum siding rustling in the wind.

  Candace couldn’t help the violent fantasies playing out in her own mind. She’d have these little scenarios where she walked in on Richard and his small-town mistress with a military-issue flamethrower cradled in her righteous arms. Or she would knock on the bimbo’s door while waiting with a vial of acid. Or she would have the slut tied up in the basement with the attendant armies of roaches and rats she herself had grown up with. She had whimsies of damage where she ran the gamut from fiendish hysterics to a robotic pitilessness. She’d let them reach a bloody zenith and then stop herself, appalled, burning with guilt and shivering with revulsion.

  (Had she really felt nothing before? Was it possible to feel nothing? Was this flux of mental gut-play something she’d kept locked inside, unwilling to let it out when she actually walked in on them, keeping the tragedy from becoming horribly, unstoppably worse? Or was this new?)

  Relax, she assured herself. It’s harmless fict
ion. A way to ease the pent-up pain. It’s THERAPY for chrissakes.

  Nothing she would ever have actually done, but Candace was angry. It seemed everyone these days was angry.

  It didn’t help that a major blizzard had recently hit and that the wind was hard as a gray fist. The intermittent fall of dirty snow diabolized the already dismal scenery, dappling it and creasing every linear tower line, dented hollow, and bruised curve in gray shades of pale lead and sullen steel, casting the same tints on faces. It might have been some horror scene done by Giger, depicting a patina of shine externally with hints of rot beneath, the absolutely ultra-modern nightmare.

  She found herself rubbing the finger where her wedding ring had rested until recently. There was an ache there, as if part of the digit had been excised, leaving an astral emptiness. Well, in a fit of pique suffered a couple of days ago, she’d dropped the large diamond and gold band into some Salvation Army Christmas pot. Sad she couldn’t even allow herself the illusion she’d been giving to charity. It had been a token of rage, not a sincere gift.

  Candace slipped into the dry cleaners, relieved to be in out of the wind. But the place was always hot enough to grow orchids in, a detail she hated, wilting as she waited for the Asian manager to acknowledge her. It also seemed to her to be an intensified multiplication of the awful miasma of the city, eventually grappling her into a state of over-anxiousness, as if the place would surely explode soon.

  “Uhh?” the little man grunted as he finally came to the counter.

  “I’ve come for my things,” Candace said, handing him her receipt ticket.