Trolley No. 1852 (4 page)

I was losing patience now
with the fulcrum on which Erwin’s self-perceived “sin” teetered.
But I
needed
him
now. “I wouldn’t worry about it, Erwin. Nature, just the same as
your god, is what made us
men,
with the
natural
proclivities
of men, so don’t get yourself
in a swiver. Now, when does the trolley come? Surely it’s not the
B-Line—”

“No, no. And it doesn’t
come every night, but when it does” —he consulted his pocket-watch
with a squint— “it would be very soon.” Another diverting pause
cruxed his expression. “But that’s another thing ‘bout this place,
Mr. Phillips, another
strange
thing, I mean.” He stared off into drab darkness.
“Time.”

“
Time?
”

“I don’t know how to
explain it”—he rubbed his brows—“but each and every time I been,
it’s seemed like I been there for
hours.
I could get on with three or
four different girls, too, and when I get out’a there I think it’s
got to be noon at least… but then I look at my watch and it’s
scarcely four-thirty in the morning or quarter till
five.”

I staved off a chuckle,
for Erwin was permitting his oblique sense of abstraction to
supervene the much more primal reality that he must not be
possessed of much sexual endurance! Then again, how much endurance
would
I
be
capable of given the sheer infrequency of my own sexual
experience?
Laughably little,
I suspected, for so long ago it was that’d I’d
been married.

Several more minutes passed, and my current
hopes passed as well. The B-Line would be arriving shortly. “Drat,”
I said. “It appears that tonight’s not our night, Mr. Erwin,” but
no sooner had I spoken the words than Erwin turned with an enthused
lurch…

At the end of the street, like something
first semi-tangible slowly materializing from the dark’s secret
ether, a bulk shape began to form. Crackling sparks grew less dim
(no doubt the sparks of electric transference from the ever-present
power wires looping overhead), companioned by a faint and very
ghostly circle of yellow light at the shape’s forward-most area
which made me think of a dying cyclopean eye. The squeal of
bearings caught my ears, then the grate of an air-break…

Erwin uttered, “This is it.”

The vehicle’s forward lamp shined so faint
it scarcely served a purpose, but finally there came another surge
of gas into the closest street-lamp, and this is when I got my
first full glimpse.

It was an older-style trolley, opened all
around in a vestibuled fashion (in other words, lacking windows)
and was of the antiquated twin-car, double-truck type whereas all
city trolleys that I’d seen were single-carred. Flaking yellow
paint, quite a murky yellow, covered all of the decrepit vehicle’s
side panels.

“This is most
definitely
not
a
city trolley,” I muttered to Erwin.

“No, Mr. Phillips. It’s
a
private
trolley. It’s not from the city transit system at
all.”

A
private
trolley…

At the forward car’s head,
I spied the motorman’s station, little more than a cubby; the
capped motorman himself stood scarcely moving at the controller
handle. In the drear, his face looked dead-pan, bereft of life;
indeed, the darkness reduced his eyes and mouth to black slits amid
a waxen pallor. Above the frame of his look-out, the car’s
identification number could be seen in black-stencil
letters:
No. 1852.

The vehicle squealed to a halt. Erwin, in an
excitement that seemed touched by fear, grabbed my arm and urged,
“The conductor’ll size you up ‘cos you’re new, but don’t worry.
He’ll let you on since you’re with me.”

“Size me up?” I had to question.

“They don’t let ruffians on.”

“Oh,” but in a city
aswarm
with ruffians and
every other manner of human flotsam, the policy was to be expected.
“But who enforces order, should the conductor mistakenly allow some
roysterers aboard?”

“The motorman,” Erwin answered in a whisper
tense with unpleasantness. “I seen it happen once. Hobos, all riled
with liquor, jumped on and started a ruckus, but the ruckus didn’t
last long.”

“The motorman’s something of a tough
customer, I take it.”

Erwin looked troubled.
“Let’s just say that them hobos are probably
still
in the hospital.”

Oh, my,
I thought.

“Come on!”

The overhead cable sparked
and crackled. I followed Erwin up the sheet-metal steps of the
first car, and in doing so, I noticed other silent riders sitting
among the wooden cross-seats; however, the wee hour’s dimness
reduced their faces to smears of shadow. The metal floor
tapped
at coming
footfalls: the boots of the conductor, a short but sure-footed
figure, who approached directly, eyed Erwin with a nod, and waved
him aboard. “This here’s my friend,” Erwin softly informed. “Not a
trouble-making bone in his body, I can vouch for it…”

The conductor, like the driver, wore a
regulation cap and heavy, brass-buttoned jacket as was the fashion.
He stared at me, or seemed to, for the car’s irksome darkness
forbade any details of his face, much in the same manner as the
motorman. My skin crawled, however, in what I can only describe as
a most abrupt accession of dread; for whatever unhealthful reason,
I imagined I was being evaluated by either a mask of the most
pallid parchment or the face of a dead man .

The moment locked in stasis.

“How do you do?” I bid with a bit of a
stammer.

The conductor waved me aboard, then returned
with lugubrious steps back to the vicinity of the motorman’s
station.

Sparks burst overhead in a brilliant
blossom, and then the trolley lurched once and commenced down the
nearly lightless street.

Erwin showed me the way down the aisle;
carefully, we stepped over the heavy-iron coupling and passed into
the rear car. “We’ve got to keep our voices down,” came his
incessant whisper. “That’s why I brung us back here.” I could
hardly object; we both took seats at the car’s rearmost
section.

As I sat, I stared
astonished into the grim, nighted city. The trolley clattered along
the rusted rails to traverse unknown streets of ballast-cobble and
past cramped lay-bys of various municipal departments that seemed
long out of service. Was it my suspicious fancy or did each
successive street-lamp put out less and less illumination? Brick
facades and lichen-encrusted stone walls pressed ever inward; at
one point we crossed what I believe was Amsterdam Avenue but as we
did so, the sinister car rose to a clamour as the motorman
increased speed, almost as if to pass through the dimly peopled
intersection with as much haste as the motor would allow. Along
this dismal way, we stopped on several occasions along similarly
unfamiliar and quite ruinous corners to pick up additional
passengers. As each boarder stepped up, he was assayed by the
conductor for what I could only guess were traits of “approval”:
the smell of liquor on one’s breath, loose talk, and perhaps even a
subjective air of rowdiness would, of course, be disqualifiers. But
as each man was allowed to come aboard, I noted quite readily that
all possessed likewise bodily characteristics. These were all men
of brawn and muscle, wide-shouldered, pillar-legged men of a solid
working caste, much like Erwin. The only oddity to be admitted thus
far was myself; with shoulders stooped, frail-bodied, and but 146
pounds, I hardly bore any commonality with these strong, ox-necked
young men. (As a child, my mother perpetually referred to me as her
“little waxbean.” How complimentary…) But it was then the notion
insinuated itself—in a manner I cannot explain by any
substance—that the conductor was indeed “sizing up” potential
visitors to the mysterious 1852 Club in hopes of selecting the most
virile, the most sexually
potent
candidates. I couldn’t imagine what might cause
me to make such a conjecture. Two or three times, however, thinner
and less-fecund-looking chaps were turned away. So…

Why on earth would a
spindly-form such as myself be let aboard?
Evidently the club held much stock in Mr. Erwin’s
credulity.

The car clattered onward for a time,
then—

We were swallowed into darkness.

It was a musty, dripping tunnel we’d darted
into, whose arched walls were eerily webbed by the faintest
luminescent fungi. When I turned to look Erwin full in the face, I
could make no trace of him. Ahead, in the forward car, did a
passenger gasp in sudden startlement?

“I told ya, Mr. Phillips. There be a tunnel
or two.” He chuckled nervously. “Hope you’re not one to be afraid
of the dark.”

“I daresay even a man of the stoutest heart
might be timid in darkness this complete,” said I, looking around
but seeing essentially nothing save for the foxfire-like etchings.
“This is a queer trek indeed.”

“It’s worth it, though.”
He tugged my sleeve just to give me a bearing. “Remember what I
said—the women are
lookers.
”

“Yes,” I grated.

“Best-looking one of ‘em
all is the madam—Miss Aheb—though she don’t, you know, turn a trick
herself. I only seen her once but… her
body…
It’s enough to make a man bay
at the moon.”

A cruel trust on my part but I couldn’t help
but rib my “Christian” friend about his continuing hypocrisy. “By
perfect, I’m certain you mean that all that God creates is perfect
and therefore exists in a totality of beauty, eh, Erwin? You
couldn’t even remotely be founding your observation upon the venal
sin of lust…”

Erwin said nothing in response, until I
assured him I was joking.

“Very funny, Mr. Phillips.”

I chuckled over several
rude bumps in the rail. “But, excuse me, Erwin, did you say the
‘madam’ of the club goes by the name of
Aheb?
”

“Yes, a furren name, I s’pose.”

Furren?
I pondered, then,
Ah, he
means foreign.
“It’s actually Egyptian
and…” I paused in the clattering dark. “Almost
sinister…”

I could sense him peering
at me. “Sinister? You should
see
her, man. Ain’t nothin’ sinister about her.
She’s
beautiful.
”

“So you’ve said. It’s
simply the name,” I related. “As you know, I was once a professor
of history, but my most refined field of study was that of secret
ancient mythologies. I’m referring to the mythological queen of a
pre-dynastic Egyptian culture known as the Ahebites whose cryptic
ruler was a notorious witch-priestess called Isimah
el-
Aheb.
We’re
talking circa 5000 B.C., Erwin, which pre-dates the first official
hieroglyphs by over fifteen hundred years. The story of Aheb,
though very obscure, was similar to the mythologies of ancient
Greece—Homer’s
Iliad,
for instance, or the legends of Zeus and Poseidon—only rather
than portraying the conquest of good over evil, we find quite the
opposite—
fictions,
I mean, written either to entertain or to fabulise the
inception of humankind.” I raised my finger in utter dark. “Ah, but
there are always those who attest that certain fables aren’t fables
at all, but
fact.
”

This, of course, I in no
way believed, but the mythology at large was one that had long held
my interest. Whose interest it was
not
holding, however, was that of
Erwin, who merely replied to my dissertation with an unemphatic
“Oh, uh, really?”

I needed to put the
pedantry of my bygone university days behind me; after all, I was a
man on his way to a whore-house. Common working folk such as Erwin
would not be roused in the least by such an arcane mythos. It was
merely curious, though, the name of this “madam”: Aheb. How could
it
not
cause me
to reflect upon those fascinating older-than-ancient myths which
detailed the supernatural revel of the Ahebites and their
sacrificial reverence to an immense commune of limbless gods hailed
as the Pyramidiles? These hideous deities existed as but pallid
hulks of flesh, never moving, only thinking, only
perceiving.
The
Pyramidiles, yes. Their human agent upon the earth was the obscene
sorceress Isimah el-Aheb who had enspelled her people to bow down
to these revolting cosmic abominations, paying homage to their
nether-dimensional
bulk
by way of enfrenzied orgies and ravenous
blood-baths which in turn generated the psychical horror on which
these gods so thrived; indeed, it was the carnally beauteous
el-Aheb who orchestrated rampant earthly horror in veneration; and
to whom the Pyramidiles had blasphemously blessed with the gift of
immortality via the sickish mold-green tincture that was but one of
their wicked secrets. To her also they’d whispered their arcane
manner of writing: a form of gematria, the substitution of numbers
for letters. Once learned of all the Pyramidiles’ harrowing
secrets, el-Aheb ruled the ancient outlands, to slaughter, pillage,
rape, and defile, all in the name of the Pyramidiles, who lived on
realms not of this earth or even this solar system, but in the
screaming upside-down crevices between space and time; indeed, the
Pyramidiles, the Putrid-Flesh Gods; eyeless, brain-filled masses of
otherworldly
organa,
each the size of a mountain and, suspiciously, the shape of
a
pyramid…