The Year's Best Horror Stories XXII

LOST ALLEYS by Jeffrey Thomas

There are places in cities only the drunk, drugged, or insane can find. Even if you have been there before, you will not find them again if sober—assuming you are one who occasionally regains sobriety. The angles and planes, the layout of buildings, conspire to direct you elsewhere, to more prosaic destinations. It may be this design is intentional. Streets point you past these alleys, and more conventional alleys bend eye and foot past the narrow suballeys. Magician’s misdirection and the psychology of art—but also our fear and inhibition of straying from the path—keep these places hidden.

I have found such secret or forgotten corners in several cities; I can usually remember what I saw at these places, but not always which city I found them in. I can’t always remember straight off in the morning which city I’m currently in. I suppose my proclivity for finding these shadowy caves in the mountain range of a city has to do with the fact that I am usually either drunk or drugged, and perhaps always insane.

Somehow tonight I had found my way back to a courtyard I had visited before in my somnambulistic wanderings. You never actually forget anything; your mind simply blots out what is unnecessary, or unwanted. But part of me must have wanted to return to see another of the battles in this tiny arena.

The walls were of brick, and stretched high, windowless. Perhaps it had been a great chimney; there was a black iron door, low to the ground. They kept some of the contestants in there. That other night, I had watched an Oriental dwarf battle a thylacine, one of those supposedly extinct Tasmanian tigers. Crates and cinder-blocks piled shoulder-high enclosed the fighting ring. When I arrived this night, several dozen dark forms ringed the ring. Only two chickens wearing spurs presently went at it.

I can’t stand cruelty to animals; I had been glad when the thylacine won. I stood back smoking a cigarette until more willing opponents were brought out. These two had made a decision to enter the ring. Not necessarily a rational decision, but they weren’t innocent victims. Well, victims yes, of many unknown tortures from without and within, but too far gone to merit much concern from me. I didn’t ask for their concern, either.

They were two naked men. One was tall and skeletal, the other short and even thinner. The tall one wore brass knuckles with spikes on one hand, in the other gripped a baling hook. His opponent held a railroad spike and a broken bottle with a much-taped neck for a handle. The short one was black, and had blacker keloids of scar tissue, primarily on his face, but I didn’t know if they were decorative or the wounds of past exhibitions.

I insinuated myself close to the ring’s barrier. Someone squeezed my ass but when I didn’t look they stopped, and anyway the battle had begun.

The gladiators sprang away from each other, the tall one swinging his brass-knuckled fist up into his own face, the short warrior gouging his bottle into his own inner thigh while pounding the dull chisel-point of his spike into his sternum. I leaned onto the wall; I’d never seen this before.

No one cheered them on. These matches were always nearly silent. Even the dying didn’t scream. A man in a three piece suit on my right clutched foreign-looking money in his fist, whispering encouragement to one of them under his breath.

The tall one had hooked himself in the leg and tore upward with terrible jerks. His blood was very distinct, if black, on his cadaverous skin. But now the black man charged him, linked arms with the man and wrestled him to the ground, the tall man’s ripped leg too agonized or damaged to resist this. The black man got his arms around both of the other’s and forced his face into the floor. Holding the tall man’s arms inside his elbows left the black man’s hands free to jab his bottle under his jaw and swing his forehead down onto the spike he clenched, hammering deep gashes into his own dark skin.

I understood now. The combatants were to combat themselves; one had to inflict more damage to himself than the other could do to his body, while preventing the other—without harming him—from mutilating himself. The black man had taken charge quickly, perhaps a running champion. But now the tall one twisted half free, and he had extricated the baling hook from his leg. He swung it up into his throat, and wrenched his arm out to one side with great force for so emaciated a creature. I heard a hiss of approval from the spectators, and a hiss of blood.

The black man bore all his slight weight down onto the other’s arm (he obviously wasn’t allowed to let go of either weapon to use his hands) but the wound was already too wide. The tall man quickly became mostly as dark as the black man, in the dim light. I felt a damp mist on my hand. The tall man convulsed under the smaller. Ah, now I knew. The black wasn’t the running champion, but the running loser, and the fight with one’s self had been to the death.

There were more contests. Two spirited adolescents one would have imagined engaged in a video game challenge instead. Two men wrestling to rape each other. A man with a spear in a wheelchair against two pit bulls which had been firmly lashed together so that they faced in opposite directions. All three lost, I understand, but I had then turned away to do the drugs I had brought with me.

I awoke inside a dark place. I realized it was the place behind that black iron door. Panic came over me. They were going to use me in the next games! But I could vaguely recall crawling into that space, and falling asleep there. When I pushed at the door, it opened on creaking rusty hinges.

Square of light at the top of the chimney, and though the shaft was blue with shadowed gloom, I was startled at the relative brightness of day. I was afraid to emerge from my safe tomb, but did. The arena was empty but for an obese man with a shaven head inside the ring, spray-painting over the dried blood. He just glanced at me. I wandered around the outside of the ring, between it and the walls of the chimney, as though circling lost in a spiral maze, smoking a broken cigarette I found.

The obese man gave me some drugs after I blew him. I sat against the brick wall, pulled my knees up close, waiting for night, saving the drugs in my pocket until much later. I would take them before the fights, however; I did not want to see the fights without the drugs.

I couldn’t leave, you understand, until that night. It was daylight. I was sober. I didn’t know the way.