The Canal Read Free Page A

clearing where the bridge was pulled on its rails,
to be parked. Alan took out a small flashlight.
    "No," said Joe. "No light." Alan ignored
him.
    Joe proceeded toward the river, careful in
the gloom. The problem was that you had a manmade waterway with
negligible current and only a vestigial connection to the sea. The
water, like the neighborhood, went nowhere. Although that hadn't
always been the case, there was in fact a flushing tunnel that,
when operational, had pushed the unclean water out and brought
fresh water from the harbor in. But when the canal's future as an
industrial waterway died, so did the tunnels funding. That was
almost 25 years ago.
    While the tunnel may have stopped, the sewers
never did. Every drain that serviced this corner of town, that
begged at the back door of every brownstone and take-out joint and
back alley gutter, they all led here. And what went in, stayed in.
The canal was like the world's greatest library of scum --
archived, compiled and preserved. An enormous sum total of
putrefaction that, from the beginning, had begun paying some
particularly weird dividends.
    There had been rumor of a sewage treatment
plant being built, probably in a bombed out crater somewhere, a
huge assembly of smog shrouded tanks and vats that would chug
through each days bounty of discharge, turning it sparkly and
clean, with a mountain fresh scent. But Joe knew this would never
happen -- talk about the future just didn't apply to the canal.
Here the future was as dead as the water. Nothing was going to
change because nothing could change. The canal wouldn't let it --
it had been left too long to its own devices, it had gotten too
mean.
    Joe rested his foot on the curb of timber
that marked the brink of the river. The water crawled just a foot
below. A dead rat, blackened and bloated as huge as a beach ball,
drifted nearby. Wouldn't want to go in there, probably. That water,
it was a toxic hatchery. The perfect medium for insane pathogens
and much, much worse.
    Joe glanced at Alan. Alan's eyes were
watering from the fumes -- they at least honestly perspired. Alan
pointed the flashlight beam across the water.
    "There it is," he said. "Hanging."
    Obscured in the shadows at the far end of the
bridge, Joe could make out a pair of arms and legs, reaching almost
to the water. The body was slung over the crossbeam at its waist.
It looked charred, a grisly crimson, the bone and tendon showing
white like marble.
    "Christ," said Joe. He had been right -- Alan
hadn't told him everything. "There's no skin."
    "...Ta-daa."
    Joe moved swiftly, blocking Alan's
flashlight. "I don't need you here, Alan. Get back on the bridge.
And nobody comes down here until I'm through."
    "I'm not going anywhere. We're out of
time--"
    "Listen to me, you...you--" Joe was trying to
formulate, he needed in this one moment to express perfectly what
he was feeling, and desperately. "Listen, you fucking shit. Get up
on the bridge and leave me the fuck alone. Nobody comes down until
I'm through!"
    He watched as Alan tried to react. There was
plainly so much anger and frustration in the man, waiting to come
out. But it...it went away. There was a hard twitch, a wavering in
the eyes, and then Alan tucked everything back inside. It maybe
went where the sweat went, some deep reservoir, back in the
attic.
    "Whatever you say," said Alan, coolly,
studying Joe with freshly summoned contempt. Then he wordlessly
retreated back to the ladder and began heaving himself up onto
street.
    Joe dug a cigarette from his coat pocket.
Maybe now he could actually accomplish a few things.
    As he smoked he mused on corpses and canals.
The body couldn't have been lowered from above; someone would need
to be in the canal, or on it, in a boat, in order to reach the
bridge. A wall lined the opposite shore of the canal. At its center
was a brick ringed sewer outlet, issuing a steady stream of body
rot. If you were standing in it, right on the lip of the outlet, if
you really