Against the Day (77 page)

True to his word, the messenger, one
“Plug” Loafsley, returned next day with lengthy and detailed instructions for
getting to his personal headquarters, the Lollipop Lounge, which turned out to
be a child bordello in the Tenderloin, one of several that Plug ran as part of
a squalid empire also in

cluding newsboys’ opium dens and
Sundayschool numbers rackets. Lindsay Noseworth, hearing this, of course “hit
the roof.” “We must immediately terminate all connection with the little
monster. No less than our moral survival is at risk here.”

“In a spirit of scientific inquiry,”
proposed Chick Counterfly soothingly, “I have no objection
myself—distasteful though it prove—to meeting with young Loafsley,
in whatever iniquitous sty he may be pleased to call his office.”

“And maybe I’d better tag along as a
chaperon,” suggested Darby Suckling. Were glances of complicity exchanged?
Accounts vary. Howbeit, later that evening, the two shipmates, disguised in
matching ensembles sportively checked in indigo and custard yellow, topped off
with pearlgray bowlers, were proceeding into the Tenderloin, following the
directions young Loafsley had provided them, finding themselves, before long,
deeper in that dark topography of Vice than either had suspected
possible—until arriving, near midnight, in a thickening waterfront fog,
before a corroded iron door, guarded by what would have been a small boy,
except for his height of seven and a half feet, with a bodily aspect in
proportion, if not indeed tending toward the stout. Something glandular, it
would seem.

Rearranging
a dicer the size of a wash tub at a more authoritative angle, “Gents, dey calls
me Tiny, wha’ kin I do fuh yiz?”

   
“Try
not to step on us,” muttered Darby.

   
“Appointment
with Plug,” said Chick mollifyingly.

“Yaw
dem Chumbs of Chantce!” cried the oversize “bouncer.” “Hey, a real honuh to
meet yiz, I reads all y’ stuff, it’s really swell—maybe all except fuh
dat Nosewoit’ kid, I ain’t so sure about him.”

   
“We’ll
tell him,” said Darby.

The
moment they stepped inside, they were hit by a strong polyaromatic gust, as if
exhaled from the corrupted lungs of Depravity herself, which included alcohol
fumes, tobacco and hempsmoke, a spectrum of inexpensive scent in which opopanax
and vervain figured prominently, with darker suggestions of bodily ejecta,
overheated metal alloys, and recentlyburnt gunpowder. A small house band,
anchored by a contrabass saxophone and also including slide cornet, mandola,
and “tin pan” piano, were tirelessly “ragging” someplace inside a protective
manifold of smoke. Everywhere in the murk glided prepubescent houris, more and
less lightly attired, dancing solo, or with customers, or with one another,
drawing from Darby appreciative when not in fact hypnotized gazes.

A
plump and energetic chanteuse of some ten summers, incandescently blond, now
emerged from a back recess wearing a gown of artificial golden

paillettes sewn, not to any underlying fabric but
only—precariously—
to one another,
creating a louche aspect
more eyecatching than even outright nakedness, and, accompanied by the tiny “jazz”
orchestra, sang,

Dey highhats us uptown,

Dey lowballs us downtown,

We’re known all around town,

As Boids oíd’ Night—

Duh goilz of duh Bowry

Looks voigin and flowry

Alongside of how we

’S regawded, awvright!

Siddown for a drink or

Jump up for a dance,

Dough ol’ Missus Grundy, she

May look askance,

Yiz can bring da wife and kiddies,

Plus yuhv uncles and aunts,

(Dey’ll love it) down in Hell’s

Kitchen tanight!

“You boys got da ‘ying’ for any o’
dis in heeuh, hey, just name it, we’ll see wha’ we kin do,” offered Plug.

“Actually—” began Darby, gazing
at the underage “songbird,” but he was interrupted by Chick Counterfly.

   
“Something
you mentioned the other day—”

   
“Yeah,
yeah? I’m just a kid, can’t remember everyt’in, can I?”

   
“Something
like, all you needed was a ‘time machine.’ . . .”

   
“So?
Who wouldn’t go fuh one o’ dem?”

“Actually,” Darby elaborated, “it was
the way you said
‘
the
time
machine.’ Almost as if you knew of a
particular one,
someplace.”

   
“Yiz
woikin fuh duh coppiz, uh what?”

“There could be a nice steerer’s fee
in this one, Plug,” mentioned Chick, casually.

   
“Yeeh?
how noice?”

Chick
produced an envelope stuffed with greenbacks, which the young tough refrained
from touching but weighed with eyebeams sensitive as a laboratory balance.
“Runnuh!” he called. Haifa dozen small urchins materialized at the table. “You!
Cheezy! Kin yiz foind d’ Doctuhv in a huvvry?”

   
“Shaw
t’ing, boss!”

   
“Giddoudahere
den, tell ’m he’s gonna have visiduhs!”

   
“You
got it, boss!”

“Be witchiz in a minnit. Drink up, ’s
onna house. Uh, an’ so’s Angela Grace heeuh.”

“Evening, boys.” It was the very
songstress in the spangled garment who, or perhaps which, had so compellingly
claimed Darby’s attention a moment before.

“
We’uh movin offa
duh Gophiz’s toif inta Hudson Dustuhs tevritawvry now
. . .
leastways whut use ta be till all dese damn bushwahs
stawhdit slickin up da place,” Plug informed the boys as their party made its
way westward and south, in the fog, which had now grown general. From far out
in the Harbor came the dismal tolling of bellbuoys, the harsh fanfares of
foghorns and steam sirens.
“Can’t see a
damn t’ing,” Plug complained. “Gotta use ah snoot. Yiz boids know what dat
‘ozone’ stuff smells like?”

Chick nodded. “I guess we’re looking
for an electrical generating station, then?”

“Blawngs tuh da Nint’ Av’nya ‘El,
’ ”
Plug said, “but the Doctuhv and dem,
like, dey share it. Some deal wit’ Mr. Mawgin. Da Machine, it uses a lotta
‘juice,’ see.”

There was a dull, fogmuffled clank.
“I think this may be your ‘El,
’ ”
called Darby in an aggrieved tone. “I just walked into some dadblamed
stanchion, here.”

   
“Oh,
poor baby!” cried Angela Grace, “let me kiss it?”

   
“If
you can find it,” muttered Darby.

“Now we just follas d’ tvrain loine
sout’,” announced Plug, “till ah snoot tells us we’re dere.”

They approached a memorial arch, gray
and timecorroded, seeming to date from some ancient catastrophe, far older than
the city. The mists parted long enough for Chick to read a legend on an
entablature,
i am the way into the
doleful city —dante
. Passing beneath the colossal arch, they
continued to grope along over fogslick cobblestones, among decaying animals,
piles of refuse, and the smoldering fires of homeless denizens of the quarter,
till at length, the pungent triatomic signature having become overwhelming,
along with a harsh buzzing which filled the vicinity, they stood before a stone
gateway dripping with moisture, the dwelling beyond largely invisible except
for a scattering of bluish electric lights blooming in this vaporous midwatch,
which neither aeronaut found himself able to read as to distance or elevation.
Plug pushed a button on the gatepost, and a metallic

voice from somewhere replied, “Later
than you think, Mr. Loafsley.” A solenoidal relay slammed into place, and the
gate screeched open.

Inside, in a mews with a carriage
house converted to a laboratory, they found an elfin figure, whom Plug
introduced as Dr. Zoot, in workingman’s fatigues, carpetslippers, smoked
goggles, and a peculiar helmet punctuated over its surface by not entirely
familiar electrical fittings.

“So! Just in from the cows and
chickens I’ll bet, seeking some new
city fun
to tell the folks about
back at those church socials! Well we might be able to fix something up for
you. Thousands of satisfied customers, all of the best sort, for Mr. Loafsley
has never disappointed me yet, ain’t that right, lad?”

As if having glimpsed through the
obscurity of Dr. Zoot’s eyeglass lenses something unacceptably ominous, Plug,
looking pale in the already harsh illumination of the laboratory, grasped
Angela Grace firmly, and together they backed out through the door as if
departing from the presence of royalty.

“Thanks, Plug,” called the boys, “bye
Angela Grace,” but the two children of the depths had already vanished.

   
“Come
along, then.”

   
“We’re
not keeping you up, Doctor, I hope,” Chick said.

“Later the better,” said Dr. Zoot.
“Not as many trains running this time of night, so the current is more
dependable, though not a patch on German product, of course
. . .
but now, gents, voilà—and you
tell me what you think.”

The Machine’s appearance struck
neither lad as particularly advanced. Amid a hoarse droning, violent blue
sparks leapt noisily between unwieldy electrodes that might not have seemed out
of place in a dynamo of Grandmother’s day. A onceunblemished exterior had
become long pitted and stained with electrolytic wastes. What numerals were
visible on the dustcovered dialfaces owed much to the design preferences of an
earlier generation, as did the Breguetstyle openwork of the indicator arrows.
More alarmingly, even the casual eye could detect everywhere emergency
weldlines, careless shimming, unmatched fasteners, blotches of primer coat
never painted over, and other evidences of the makeshift. The overwhelming
impression was of revenue diverted from any but the simplest upkeep.

   
“This
is it?” blinked Darby.

   
“Problem?”

“Can’t speak for my partner,”
shrugged the acerbic juvenile, “but it’s a little ramshackle for a time
machine, ain’t it?”

“Tell you what, how’s about a sample
ride, into the future, then and back, only charge you half price, and if you
like it, we can try something more audacious.”

With
a gay panache somewhat compromised by the hideous shrieking of the hinges and a
noticeable sag to the guttapercha gasketry around the coaming, Dr. Zoot swung
open the hatch of the passenger chamber and nodded them inside, where the boys
found an odor of spilled—and to the instructed nose, suggestively
cheap—whiskey. The passenger seating appeared to’ve been purchased at
auction long ago, with unmatched upholstery as stained and worn as the wood
finishes were scarred and cigarburned.

   
“This
will be fun,” said Darby.

Through the single smeared quartz
window of the chamber, the lads observed Dr. Zoot lurching frantically about
the room, setting forward the hands of every timepiece he encountered,
including those of his own pocketwatch. “Oh, please,” groaned Darby, “ain’t
this kind of insulting? How do we undog this hatch and get the heck out of
here?”

“We don’t,” replied Chick, indicating
the absence of the necessary fixtures with an air more of scholarly curiosity
than the panicked alarm one might, in the circumstances, have forgiven
him—“no more than we are likely to find in here any means of controlling
our ‘journey.’ We seem to be at the mercy of this Dr. Zoot person, and must now
proceed in a faith that his character will prove not altogether diabolical.”

“Swell. Something a little different
for the Chums of Chance. One of these days, Counterfly, our luck’s gonna run
out—”

   
“Suckling,
look—the window!”

   
“Don’t
see anything.”

   
“That’s
just it!”

   
“Maybe
he turned off the lights.”

“No—no, there’s light. Maybe
not light as we know it, but. . .” The two boys squinted at where the quartz
translucency had been, trying to make out what was happening. A kind of
vibration, less from the physical chamber itself than from somewhere
unsuspected within their own nervous organizations, now began to strengthen in
intensity.

They seemed to be in the midst of
some great storm in whose low illumination, presently, they could make out, in
unremitting sweep across the field of vision, inclined at the same angle as the
rain, if rain it was—some material descent, gray and
windstressed—undoubted human identities, masses of souls, mounted,
pillioned, on foot, ranging along together by the millions over the landscape
accompanied by a comparably unmeasurable herd of horses. The multitude extended
farther than they could see—a spectral cavalry, faces disquietingly
wanting in detail, eyes little more than blurred sockets, the draping of
garments constantly changing in an invisible flow which perhaps was only wind.
Bright arrays of metallic points hung and drifted in