“Yes they are in you now at the crossroads and here are more, oh yes—” He gestured, happy as a church usher at a revival, ushering in seven more people, who crowded past Ash to throng the room, shifting aimlessly from foot to foot, gaping sightlessly, whining to themselves, bumping into one another at random. Blocking Ash, without seeming to try, every time he made for the door. Pushing him gently but relentlessly back toward the window.
The manager was no longer speaking in English, nor was he speaking Hindi; his face was no longer a man’s, but something resembling that of a hyena and a goat and a man, and he was speaking in an African tongue — Yoruba? — with a sound that was as strange to Ash as the cry of an animal on the veldt, but he knew, anyway, with a kind of a priori knowledge, what the man was saying. Saying...
That these people were those disenfranchised by the old man’s death: the old armored-car guard’s death meant that his wife would not be able to provide the money to help her son-in-law start that business and he goes instead into crime and then to life in prison, and his children, fatherless, slide into drugs, and lose their hope and then their lives and as a direct result they beat and abuse their own children and those children have children which they beat and abuse (because they, themselves, were beaten and abused) and they all grow up into psychopaths and aimless, sleepwalking automatons... Who shoved, now, into this room, made it more and more crushingly crowded, murmuring and whining as they elbowed Ash back to the window. There were thirty in the little room, and then forty, and then forty-five and fifty, the crowd humid with body heat and sullen and dully urgent as it crowded Ash against the window frame. He looked over his shoulder, peered through the glass. Maybe there was escape, out there.
But outside the window it was a straight drop four floors to a trash heap. It was an air shaft, an enclosed space between buildings to provide air and light for the hotel windows. Air shafts filled up with trash in places like this; bottles and paper sacks and wrappers and wet boxes and shapeless sneakers and bent syringes and mold-carpeted garbage and brittle condoms and crimped cans. The trash was thicker, deeper than in any air shaft he’d ever seen. It was a cauldron of trash, subtly seething, moving in places, wet sections of cardboard shifting, cans scuttling; bottles rattling and strips of tar paper humping up, worming; the wet, stinking motley of the air shaft weaving itself into a glutinous tapestry.
No, he couldn’t go out there. But there was no space to breathe now, inside, and no way to the door; they were piling in still, all the victims of his shooting. The ones killed or maimed by the ones abandoned by the ones lost by the one he had killed. How many people now, in this room made for one, people crawling atop people, piling up so that the light was in danger of being crushed out against the ceiling?
One killing can’t lead to so much misery, he thought.
Oh but the gunshot’s echoes go on and on, the happy, mocking Ishu said. On and on, white devil cocksucker man.
What is this place? Ash asked, in his head. Is it Hell?
Oh no, this is the city. Just the city. Where you have always lived. Now you can see it, merely, white demon cocksucker man. Now stay here with us, with your new family, where he called you with his dying breath...
Ash couldn’t bear it. The claustrophobia was of infinite weight. He turned again to the window, and looked once more into the air shaft; the trash decomposing and almost cubistically recomposed into a great garbage disposal churn, that chewed and digested itself and everything that fell into it.
The press of people pushed him against the window so that the glass creaked.
And then thirty more, from generations hence, came through the door, and pushed their way in. The window glass protested. The newcomers pushed, vaguely and sullenly, toward the window. The glass cracked — and shrieked once.
Only the glass shrieked. Ash, though, was silent, as he was heaved through the shattering glass and out the window, down into the air shaft, and into the innermost reality of the city.
About the contributors
Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914) was a journalist and satirist who contributed to and edited a number of newspapers, including the San Francisco News Letter, the Californian, and the Wasp. His best-known works include the scathing collection The Devil’s Dictionary and the short story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” which has been adapted into film, radio broadcasts, and teleplays.
Craig Clevenger was born in Dallas, Texas and currently lives in San Francisco. He is the author of two novels, The Contortionist’s Handbook and Dermaphoria, and is currently working on his third. He can be found at www.craigclevenger.com.
Janet Dawson created Oakland, California private investigator Jeri Howard, who has sleuthed her way through nine novels. Jeri’s first case, Kindred Crimes, won the St. Martin’s Press/Private Eye Writers of America contest for Best First Private Eye Novel, and earned Shamus, Macavity, and Anthony award nominations as well. Her short story “Voice Mail,” in the collection Scam and Eggs, won a Macavity Award. Another story, “Slayer Statute,” received a Shamus Award nomination. She works at the Institute of Urban and Regional Development at the University of California, Berkeley.
Fletcher Flora (1914–1968) wrote over sixty mystery and noir stories for major crime publications such as Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. He also wrote sixteen novels and coauthored many more, including Hildegarde Withers Makes the Scene, a crime novel about the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco.
Joe Gores, a former San Francisco — based private investigator, is the author of dozens of screenplays, television scripts, biographies, short stories, and novels, including the acclaimed DKA detective series. A Northern California resident, he has won three Edgar Awards and Japan’s Maltese Falcon Award.
Don Herron is best known for leading the Dashiell Hammett Tour in San Francisco since 1977, giving him a long working acquaintance with the city of the 1920s and hardboiled stories pounded out for publication in the pulp magazine Black Mask. He is the author of various books, including The Literary World of San Francisco & Its Environs and Willeford, a survey of the life and times of cult noir author Charles Willeford.
Jack London (1876–1916), a San Francisco native, is best known today for his adventure novel The Call of the Wild and his pro-socialist dystopia The Iron Heel. But during his lifetime his greatest successes were his prolific short fiction, many of which are set in the Bay Area.
Peter Maravelis has had a lifelong involvement in the world of arts and letters. For over twenty years, he has been a bookseller and events producer. He is currently the events director at City Lights Bookstore. He was born and raised in San Francisco, where he currently lives.
Seth Morgan (1949–1990) published only one novel, Homeboy (1990), which won him high critical praise in many cities including San Francisco, where the work is set. The novel’s preoccupation with heroin addicts and convicts perhaps best captures Morgan’s own troubled life of drugs and crime. He won the PEN essay contest for convicts while incarcerated for armed robbery in the mid 1970s.