Cellars Read online

  Cellars

  John Shirley

  Night Shade Books

  An Imprint of Start Publishing LLC

  New York, New York

  CELLARS © 1982, 2006 by John Shirley.

  This edition of CELLARS published 2013 by Night Shade Books.

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Night Shade Books, 609 Greenwich Street, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10014

  Published by Night Shade Books,

  an imprint of Start Publishing LLC

  New York, New York

  Please visit us on the web at

  www.nightshadebooks.com

  ISBN 978-1-62793-311-7

  CELLARS was first published in the Avon Books,

  a division of the Hearst Corporation.

  Book cover and interior designed by Paula Guran

  Front cover photograph by Matt Dula

  ABOUT CELLARS BY JOHN SHIRLEY

  An ancient evil deep beneath New York City turns subway stations into bloody altars for ritual sacrifice. Monsters made of blood arise from drains, an invisible hellhound devours human flesh, feral children stalk the shadowy streets and make murder a terrifying game. Occult investigator Carl Lanyard risks his life, his love, and his sanity as he battles the unspeakable forces of darkness.

  PRAISE FOR CELLARS

  "Today [1988], the relentless over-the-top horror-baroque of Cellars brings Clive Barker to mind. It reads like Lovecraft on PCP. In 1982, there was nothing quite like it."

  —William Gibson

  "Cellars proved to be one of my strongest creative inspirations, ever. It seems unreal to me that I first read it nearly a quarter of a century ago...Yet after all that time, it's one of the few horror novels I'm first to recall. Because it was a progenitor to a good-sized pie wedge of the horror market in 2006. Some books are timeless, immune to fading from their original creative luster, and Shirley's early masterpiece of the form is one such endeavor. I hope this new edition of Cellars inspires new writers today the way it inspired me so long ago....The bottom line is this: One of the very first hardcore horror novels truly remains one of the very best, even after two and a half decades."

  —Edward Lee (Introduction to Cellars)

  "Shirley's 1982 novel of urban monsters and terror seems just as fresh, just as scary now as it did back then." [Trashotron]

  —Rick Kleffel

  THIS BOOK IS FOR

  Dale Van Wormer

  TO WHOM I TOLD SCARY STORIES WHEN WE WERE KIDS

  Author’s Note for the 2006 Edition

  I edited this edition of Cellars in the way I would have done if I’d had time and perspective when I wrote it in the early 1980s. Most of the editing consists of strategic cuts. I feel it’s a much stronger book now.

  Cellars still contains a great many scenes I’m proud to have written because they accurately depict the New York City, especially the Lower East Side, I knew in that era. I lived there and I reported on it. The novel is about the atmosphere prevailing at the time—one that seems to be coming back, now, stronger than ever—which constantly reinforced the idea that anything was permissible if it made you a success, if it made you rich, powerful, famous. Parts of New York City, in those days, were in a sad state of decay. There have been improvements, sometimes at the cost of gentrification and a loss of housing for the poor. But I described it as I saw it.

  I originally had an epilogue in which we learn that things aren’t quite what they’d seemed at the end of the last chapter. But either an editor or my dark mood at the time convinced me to cut the scene.

  I decided to restore it from memory. So this edition has some new text—and it’s text that belongs there.

  John Shirley

  April 2006

  Introduction to the New Edition of Cellars

  By Edward Lee

  True story, and I hope it bids a laugh. In December, 2004, I’m at Tampa International waiting to take a flight back to Maryland to visit my mother for Christmas. I’m flying Southwest, and they don’t do assigned seating. They do boarding groups, and I get Group A, the first on. The only problem is, if you want to be up front in your group, you have to stand in line well before they begin to board. In other words, you can’t sit. You gotta stand. So I’m standing there in line, and I’m re-reading John Shirley’s novel Cellars.

  It’s one of my hands down, all-time favorite horror novels, by the way, a book I think of as one of the most important of its kind. Originally published in 1982, it was a novel that ruptured the boundaries of what we thought of as the horror genre and macheted a by-way through the sensibilities of the readership, to give a lot of freshman writers, myself included, a hopeful new path to follow. And I was re-reading it in the airport to refresh my memory for this introduction that I am indeed very honored to write.

  Anyway, I’m standing there, see? I’m in my boarding group line, reading Cellars. That’s when I get the good old proverbial feeling that…I’m being watched. I peek over the top of the book several times and soon realize that it ain’t no “feeling.” Other people in the line are giving me funky looks: stern grimaces, frowns, expressions of disapproval and even disgust. I tell myself it’s just my imagination and forget it. Then I get on the plane.

  I’m sitting in my seat now, still reading, not making a sound, not bothering anyone. I’m simply reading a book and minding my own business.

  But people are still staring at me.

  Anyone coming down the aisle shoots me a stare. The lady sitting next to me (who looks like Mrs. Howell on Gilligan’s Island) actually seems distressed. Then the flight attendant glides by to close the overhead bins and even SHE frowns at me.

  Do I have a booger hanging out of my nose? What, am I—funny? Do I look like an asshole? Why is everyone on this GODDAMN PLANE staring at me?

  Then it occurs to me…I turn my copy of Cellars around and there it is on the back cover, in big red block letters, in letters bigger than any cover copy I’ve ever seen in my life, these words: FLESH FOR SATAN.

  No wonder everyone was looking at me like I’m the Boston Strangler. In this day any age of airline paranoia, I’m surprised they didn’t throw me off the plane, or check my luggage for black mass candles and baby skulls. Yessiree, that was it, all right. FLESH FOR SATAN.

  Which brings me to Cellars.

  The protagonist, writer Carl Lanyard, is quite an atypical main character; he has to be for this kind of book, and for the excursion that awaits. After trial and error, he’s rejected traditionalist values: wife, kids, upper-class 9-to-5 office job, and the four-dollar cup of Starbucks every morning. Instead, life has hammered him into an edgy neo-existentialism, selfish-through-insight, keenly-perceptive-through-failure, and—by way of his utter disillusionment with the modern world and all its corporate, capitalistic, and industrial trimmings—he’s seeing the way to his own actualization. Lanyard’s a good guy but not necessarily a nice guy. Was Gregor in Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” a nice guy? Of course not. But through his symbolic and ghastly transformation, he becomes enlightened in a world even MORE ghastly, and is able to refurbish a functional morality. All Carl Lanyard wants is enough money to sit in a room and write full time (hey, wait a minute, that sounds like me!) because in doing so he will indeed harness the meaning of his life and his place as a human unit in a very hostile Sartrean universe; hence, my existential allusions. Lanyard is a modern day Roquentin. He is Candide finding his rebirth not through the sea but through the bowels of New York City, through channels and sewer passages and catacombs, and through “interminable tunnels leading to cellars beneath cellars.”

  If my analysis o
f Lanyard sounds stodgy, don’t get me wrong. That’s merely my jubilant interpretation of the character. (I LOVE this character!) Cellars is not a book pretending to be a literary event. It is not a morality play. It is not a covert examination of man’s inhumanity to man. And it’s not some arcane egg-heady symbol about something else. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar! All you critics out there want to know what Cellars is really “about?” I’ll tell you.

  It’s about devil worship. It’s about selling your soul for power and profit. It’s about sex and violence and demons and evisceration as homage to hell’s hierarchs and burying puppy dogs up to their necks!

  It’s about FLESH FOR SATAN!

  Here’s why I bought this book way back in 1982. Certainly we had some very cool stuff in the genre at large, mostly “quiet” fare, sure, but fine work. However we didn’t find a whole lot of books that had the balls to really live up to the potential of the genre’s title (HORROR), and only a precious few broke past the borders into “hardcore.” (I…ramble a lot, don’t I?) When I first saw Cellars I almost didn’t pick it up. The original paperback cover wasn’t that great; I almost walked away from it because it looked like one of those “mad dog” novels. But then I looked at the small print beneath the title, and here’s what I saw:

  Descend into the darkness beneath the city streets and die in hell.

  Holy shit! Is that cover copy or what? (Hallmark needs to put that line inside a greeting card.) Then I turned the book over and got poked in the eye by those three magic words: FLESH FOR SATAN.

  Nope, this definitely wasn’t “quiet” horror. This wasn’t armchair stuff. By page twelve, Cellars lived up to its cover-copy and then some:

  …Her skirt had been hiked up around her waist. Her breasts had been symmetrically quartered, like fruit sections in a salad. Her solar plexus had been neatly opened and laid back in four sections…Intestines, gray mottled with blue-pink and glistening with drops of red, had been extracted, severed, and rearranged in a pattern that reminded Lanyard of a Chinese ideogram.

  This scene was just the first drop into the very big and very demented bucket of blood that John Shirley emptied onto the heads of thousands of unsuspecting readers back in the cutesy days of E.T., Mork & Mindy, and Cabbage Patch dolls.

  What a wonderful outrage. What a delicious disregard to the candyass mainstream. Bear in mind, back in 1982, it was almost unheard of to find imagery this abundant and this explicit in a mass-market paperback novel sitting in every bookstore in the country right next to John Saul and Sidney Sheldon. Cellars thrilled me, not just because it’s a thrilling story but because it gave me hope. I was just starting out as a writer myself back then, and what I foresaw was a pretty dull future as far as mass-market horror went—until I read Cellars. The book opened a door for me. It showed me that I could dare too.

  There were a lot of more marketable things John Shirley could’ve chosen to write back when Reagan first came into office. But he chose to write Cellars. He chose the hardcore.

  Cellars proved to be one of my strongest creative inspirations, ever. It seems unreal to me that I first read it nearly a quarter of a century ago. (Damn it! Where’d this gray hair come from?) Yet after all that time, it’s one of the few horror novels I’m first to recall. Because it was a progenitor to a good-sized pie wedge of the horror market in 2006. Some books are timeless, immune to fading from their original creative luster, and Shirley’s early masterpiece of the form is one such endeavor. I hope this new edition of Cellars inspires new writers today the way it inspired me so long ago.

  The bottom line is this: One of the very first hardcore horror novels truly remains one of the very best, even after two and a half decades.

  Edward Lee

  St. Pete Beach, Florida

  January 20, 2005

  Cellars

  PROLOGUE

  Carl Lanyard, 1955

  “Maybe he’s a gypsy,” said the taller of the two boys. Both boys were blond and pimply, and both were Carl’s age, ten years old. But they were very much bigger than Carl. He gazed up at them, hoping he didn’t seem so defiant that they would take his look as a challenge. The smaller blond boy snapped his fingers under Carl’s nose, and, thinking he was about to be struck, Carl flinched back, blinking.

  The boys laughed. They stepped closer, crowding him.

  Carl was frightened, but he couldn’t help but think: It’s funny the things you notice when you’re afraid. He’d been frightened, too, at his uncle’s funeral. Frightened because he’d never seen a corpse before, and because he thought he glimpsed dark things squirming in the air over the coffin, though he knew nothing could be there. Frightened—yet he’d noticed that one of Mrs. Gilder’s front teeth was yellower than the others, and the funeral chapel smelled like Bon Ami cleanser, and Mr. Bruckner kept sniffing surreptitiously at his own armpit, and, even though it was a funeral, Sandra was flirting with that guy Earl who owned the Cycle Shop, and Mr. Connely was arguing in a whisper with Mrs. Connely, who kept trying to shush him up.

  Now, just after school had let out for the weekend, as the two boys were leaning over him about to pound him into the ground, Carl was aware of the Indian Summer sun warming the back of his neck and the strong scent of mown grass coming from the house across the street from the school, and that someone had mowed over a heap of dog waste because you could smell it mixed with grass cuttings; he noticed a flock of birds too distant to identify was flying south in a ragged formation; he noticed a black terrier carrying off one of the school’s softballs, pausing now and then to drop it all slathery and gnaw the ball like a bone.

  He noticed when he was frightened he looked at the details of everything except the thing that frightened him.

  “Yeah, a gypsy or sumthin’,” said the taller boy. His name was Frank Bonham, Carl remembered suddenly, and his friend was Manny Something-or-other. Manny yanked at a lock of Carl’s black hair; Carl jerked his head free and tried to smile. “Actually,” Carl said impulsively, “I’m part English, with some black Irish ancestry. The black Irish part is why I’m so dark. Uh—you see, the survivors of the Spanish Armada were washed up in Ireland and they married into—ow!”

  Manny had yanked Carl’s hair again. Frank, blue eyes glazing, reached out and grabbed a handful of hair on the other side of Carl’s head, then jerked it hard, twice, accenting certain words with each yank: “‘I’m part English, with black Irish ancestry’!”

  “Black? Part nigger. That explains it,” said Manny.

  They were in a corner of the school grounds, shielded from the school windows by the sports field’s bleachers. No one saw Carl twist free and turn to run; no one saw the two boys, yipping in imitation of TV cowboys riding herd, darting after him, tripping him so that he fell face down. They dropped onto his back, knees jabbing him in the kidneys and ribs. He didn’t cry out, only because the pain was so deep and sharp that he was paralyzed with astonishment.

  “You been looking at Mr. Connely’s house and—”

  “Never mind, Frank,” the other boy cut in.

  Carl tasted dirt and there was a weird ringing in his ears. He thought he would break in half from the pressure on his back.

  Frank banged on the base of Carl’s skull; Carl found himself worrying that they would break his teeth on a rock and he would have to come to school with gaps in his teeth and everyone would say—

  He didn’t complete the thought, because Frank was shouting in his ear: “Just shut up about seeing anything but the dirt under yer nose, nigger-gypsy!” Carl could feel the boy’s spittle on his cheek. “You don’t see nothin’! You don’t hear nothin’!”

  “You understand that?” Manny was twisting Carl’s arms behind him; Carl could feel the wrist bones strain, near cracking. “You understand that?” Manny shouted at him.

  “Yeah, yeah I do,” said Carl fervently.

  And then the weight was gone; the noise was gone. He was lying alone in the dirt of the sports field. He could hear the slap of their t
ennis shoes as they left him.

  He realized, then—“You been looking at Mr. Connely’s”—that Mr. Connely had paid them to beat him up so he wouldn’t tell anybody about hearing Mrs. Connely’s voice. Mrs. Connely was dead. Mr. Connely said she’d fallen off the ladder. Accidentally. Carl hadn’t said anything to contradict that. Not Carl. He’d only told a few people what Mrs. Connely had told him, when he’d walked past the place where she’d died.

  But he wouldn’t anymore. No more hearing, no more seeing. Except the details that didn’t hurt. Except the dirt under his nose. The kids had made fun of him for two years. The pain in his back told him: No more.

  And after that he didn’t hear the voices, didn’t see the quick movements in the air; the movements he’d called “magician’s hands,” those flickerings like disembodied hands fluttering. No voices, no hands; nothing but the dirt: and the schools and the roads and the trees and the houses and the people on the dirt.

  ONE

  Carl Lanyard: 1981

  Fingers trembling slightly, Lanyard punched out the number on the pay phone. Partly he was nervous because he had to report his failure to Maguss. And partly he was nervous in the way he always was when he spoke to Simon Maguss. Carl Lanyard had never met his employer. All their communication had been by phone or by mail. An unnatural way to do business, in Lanyard’s view.

  “May I help you?”

  Lanyard gave the operator his credit card number. He glanced at his watch—it was ten AM.

  As the phone at the other end rang, Lanyard glanced over his shoulder at the currents of humanity tangling through Kennedy International Airport. He frowned, thinking for a moment that he’d glimpsed Madelaine Springer at the information desk. Lanyard wasn’t wearing his glasses; he wasn’t sure. It was unlikely she’d be here. It would be a disturbing coincidence. Maybe he could—