Duchess of the Elevated

by Fritz Leiber, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

At ten past three in the morning the Elevated belongs to nobody. The bars along Kessling Avenue have put their chairs up on the tables like beetles dead on their backs, the laundry vents have given up pretending to be fog, and the last southbound train goes clanking over the river bridge with every light burning and every car empty: a lit stage rolling through a dark house, playing to the rivets.

Arvid Toomey had ridden that train four nights a week for nine years, because a signal maintainer on the night shift goes where the signals are, and the signals are everywhere. He stood six feet seven in his safety boots and was broad in a way that made doorways look apologetic. He sang under his breath, Swedish hymns his grandmother had taught him, only the tunes; the words had rusted off long ago. He kept a correspondence game of chess going on his phone with a retired dentist in Tasmania, one move a day, and he had never once been frightened on the Elevated. Not by the men who slept on the heating grates, not by the rats who ran along the conductor rail like tightrope walkers with somewhere to be.

He was frightened now, on the night of the fourteenth of September, because the train had just told him the next stop was Gallows Street.

There had been no Gallows Street station since 1952. Arvid knew it the way he knew his own shoe size. The platform had been pulled down and the stairs sold for scrap; what remained was a widening of the trestle above a tyre shop, a bulge in the ironwork like a badly healed bone. And yet the voice had said it, the voice that said all the stations: the warm contralto, faintly amused, that had been telling the city to stand clear of the closing doors since before Arvid had begun to shave.

"Next stop, Gallows Street. Doors will open on the left."

The train did not stop. It slowed. He felt the brakes take hold with a long cast-iron sigh, and for the space of a breath the left-hand windows showed him a platform: lamps in wire cages, a tin sign for Sweet Caporal cigarettes, a man in a hat reading a folded newspaper by the light of a match. Then the brakes let go, the platform was a tyre shop roof again, and the voice said, in exactly the tone it used for every station in the city, "Kessling Avenue. Change here for the Number Four bus."

Arvid sat down on the orange plastic seat, which received him with a groan. He did what any sensible man does when the board produces a move he has never seen before. He did not panic. He wrote it down in the fault log, time and location and symptom, and the next afternoon he went to find the owner of the voice.

---

Her name was Henrietta Lorrimer, and the transit authority's archive held her on a single index card: Station announcements, full system. Recorded 11–13 March 1986. Fee $900. All rights assigned in perpetuity. Perpetuity had turned out to be longer than anyone in 1986 had imagined. In 2019 the authority bought a new announcement system, a clever grey box that took the old recordings, cut them into words and half-words and breaths, and glued them back together into whatever sentence the day required. Service is suspended between — Delancey — and — Ninth Street — owing to — a police incident. Hettie Lorrimer had never in her life said police incident. The box said it for her eleven times a day.

She lived on the fourth floor of a walk-up above a shuttered piano showroom, and she opened the door to him on the chain: a small woman somewhere near eighty, with a face like a clever walnut and hair dyed the red of a theatre curtain.

"If you are from the church," she said, "I have been saved already. Twice. It didn't take either time."

"I'm from the Elevated, ma'am."

"Ah." She looked up at him, a long way up, with the expression of a stage manager appraising a flat that has wandered off its marks. "Then you are from the only church I ever joined. I gave it my voice, and it gave me nine hundred dollars and forty years of being told by myself to watch my step. What do you want, giant?"

He told her. He told it badly, because he was not a talker, but he told it in order, the way he would log a fault. Gallows Street. Then, on the next two nights, Arbuthnot Yards, demolished 1961, and Linden Crossing, demolished 1970, each with its brief impossible platform. The lamps. The man with the match. A woman in a cloth coat holding a cake box by its string, who had looked up at the train and smiled as if it were late but forgiven.

Hettie listened with her head on one side, like a bird deciding whether a thing is a worm. When he had finished she slid the chain off.

"Come in," she said. "Mind the step. There isn't one, but I find people like to be warned."

---

The apartment smelled of cold cream, old paper and cat, though no cat appeared. Playbills covered the walls in overlapping ranks, curling at the corners like a flock of moulting birds: Hedda Gabler, The Rivals, Mother Courage, a dozen comedies with titles nobody remembered and exclamation marks nobody needed. She sat him on a sofa that sank under him like a rowing boat taking on water, and she poured him tea from one pot and herself tea from another, and Arvid, who had a cousin in the program, did not ask about the second pot.

"Gallows Street, 1952," Hettie said. "Arbuthnot Yards, 1961. Linden Crossing, 1970." She tapped the saucer with a fingernail painted the same shade as her hair. "It's going forward, did you notice? Like a man walking up a corridor reading the numbers on the doors."

"I noticed," Arvid said. He took out his phone and showed her the list he had made, the closed stations of the Elevated in order of their closing, and drew his thumb down it to the next name. "Majestic. Closed 1981. They renamed it Harmon Street when the theatre came down."

Hettie did not look at the phone. She was looking at the one playbill that hung by itself, framed, over the gas fire: The Majestic Theatre presents John Webster's THE DUCHESS OF MALFI, and beneath the title, in letters only slightly smaller than Webster's, HENRIETTA LORRIMER. The date was October 1979.

"The station had a staircase straight into the lobby," she said. "You could come off the train in your evening clothes and never touch the street. Very grand. Very pointless. Nobody in this city has owned evening clothes since Prohibition." She drank her tea. "The box has only my voice, you understand. Every word it has ever spoken, it learned from three days of me in a booth on Ninth Street with a sound engineer named Lou who chewed liquorice and called me 'sweetheart' on the talkback. So if something is saying the names of dead stations, it is saying them with my mouth."

"Yes, ma'am."

"Stop calling me ma'am. I was never a ma'am. I played two queens, a duchess and a great many tarts, and the tarts were the best-written." She set the cup down, and the saucer rang a little, because her hand was not quite steady. "You've worked out what comes after Majestic."

"After Majestic, nothing closed until 1994," Arvid said. "But that's the Green Line. It doesn't run on our trestle."

"So Majestic is the last door in the corridor."

"On this line. Yes."

She looked at him for a long moment, and Arvid had the odd sensation, which he would have again before the night was out, of being an audience of one. Then she smiled, a sudden wicked smile that took thirty years off her and put them somewhere he could not see.

"What time is your ten-past-three train," she asked, "at ten past three?"

---

She came in a black coat with a fur collar that had been a fox once and was now mostly an opinion, and a hat with a feather, and the red hair underneath the hat like a lamp behind a shade. She came up the steps of Kessling Avenue station at five to three in the morning as though she were making an entrance down a staircase built for her, and the man asleep on the bench by the turnstiles opened one eye, looked at her, and closed it again in the manner of a critic who has seen enough.

"You're dressed up," Arvid said.

"One is always dressed up for a first night. You are not dressed up. You are dressed as a large orange traffic cone."

"It's a hi-vis vest."

"It's a tragedy, darling, and I know tragedy." She took his arm, which meant reaching up for it like a woman reaching for a strap on a bus. "Talk to me about something other than ghosts. What do you do with that telephone when you're not frightening old women?"

He told her about the dentist in Tasmania, and the game, which was in its fourth year and its thirty-first move, and the knight he had sacrificed in March that the dentist had still not taken, because the dentist suspected it was poisoned.

"Is it?"

"I don't know," Arvid said honestly. "I thought so when I played it."

Hettie laughed: a real laugh, not the box's laugh, which did not exist. It had a crack down the middle like a good bell. "That," she said, "is the whole of the theatre. You play the move, you believe it, and the other fellow does half the work by being afraid of it."

The ten-past-three came in at twelve past, as it generally did, empty and blazing, and they sat in the front car with the driver's cab sealed behind its door of scratched steel. The doors closed. The voice told them to stand clear. Hettie, hearing it, closed her eyes the way people do at the dentist, and Arvid saw her mouth move along with it — stand clear of the closing doors — exactly in time, the way an actor's lips move in the wings when another actor has the line.

"Do you hate it?" he asked. "Hearing it?"

"I don't hear it. Nobody hears it. That's the trick of it. It's a voice that's always there, and so it's nowhere." She opened her eyes. "I made it the week I left hospital, did your archive tell you that? I was very poor and very ill and I had to prove to my sister I could still get up in the morning and say words into a microphone without crying. Lou wanted something neutral. I gave him neutral. Do you know how hard neutral is, for a woman who has played the Duchess of Malfi?"

"I don't know the play," said Arvid.

"Nobody does. That's why they let me do it."

The train went over the river. The water was black and smelled of iron and diesel. The city went by on either side like a set that had been struck and stacked against the back wall: water towers, billboards for injury lawyers, a church with its neon cross half lit so that it read as a plus sign. Delancey. Ninth Street. The box said the names of living stations and they were only names.

Then the box said, "Next stop, Majestic. Doors will open on the left. Change here for the theatre."

---

The brakes took hold. This time they did not let go.

The train slid to a stop, and the doors on the left opened, and there was no platform beyond them. There was a stage.

Arvid knew stages only from school, from a nativity play in which he had been a tree. But he knew this was one. The boards ran away from the lip of the car to a painted wall of grey stone; a single high window was painted on it, with painted bars; there was straw on the floor and a stool and a hanging lamp that gave a light the colour of weak tea. Beyond the edge of the stage, where the street ought to have been, forty feet down, was a great dark scooped-out space that breathed. He could smell it: dust, velvet, oranges, sweat, cigarette smoke from a decade when people smoked in theatres, and under all of it something hot and electric, like the inside of a valve radio.

There were people in the dark. He could not see them so much as feel their attention, the way you feel a draught. One of them struck a match, and in its small flare he saw a hat, a folded newspaper, and beside it a woman in a cloth coat with a cake box on her knee.

"Oh," said Hettie Lorrimer, very softly. "Oh, the house is in."

The doors did not close. The box made the little two-note chime it made before every announcement, and then it spoke, from every speaker in the car and from somewhere out in the dark as well, and it spoke in pieces, the way it always spoke: word by word, the joins showing, each word lifted out of some different sentence she had said in a booth on Ninth Street forty years ago.

"I — am — Duchess — of — Malfi — still."

Hettie had gone white under her powder. Her hand on Arvid's arm had become a claw.

"That's the line," she said. "Act Four. They've shown her her husband and children dead, in wax, and they've sent her madmen and they've told her she's nothing, and she says it. I am Duchess of Malfi still. Seven words. I said them every night for three weeks, and on the Thursday of the third week I opened my mouth and there was nothing in it. Not a syllable. And the prompter gave it to me, a nice boy called Desmond in a cardigan, and I heard him, and I could not take it. I could not take it from him. I stood there for a hundred years and then I walked off the stage and out of the stage door and into a bar on Harmon Street, and I did not come out again for six years, not really. They brought the understudy on in my dress." She was breathing fast. "It's been prompting me. All the way up the corridor. It's been prompting me in my own voice."

"It's a box," Arvid said. "It's a computer in a cabinet on Ninth Street. It cuts up words."

"So did Webster." She let go of his arm. "Giant. Arvid. You're a sweet man and you sing hymns to yourself when you think nobody's listening, and I'm going to go and say my line."

"There's no floor," he said. He said it as gently as he could, and as plainly, because it was a fact and he was a man for facts. "That's Harmon Street. The platform came down in 1981. There's the trestle and forty feet of air and the roof of a laundromat."

"There is a stage," said Hettie, "and there is a house, and the house is in. I have stood on worse floors than air."

She moved before he did. He was a big man and a slow one, and she had spent fifteen years being taught by fight directors how to slip a grip on a crowded stage without anyone in the fourth row seeing it go. His hand closed on fur collar and nothing else. She was through the open doors and onto the boards, and the boards held her, and the tea-coloured lamp found her and lit her the way it must have lit her in October 1979, and the dark beyond the footlights stopped rustling.

She did not look back at the train. She lifted her chin.

"I am Duchess of Malfi still."

She did not say it loud. She did not need to. The voice that had told the city ten million times to stand clear of the closing doors said seven words in one unbroken breath, without a single join, and Arvid Toomey, who did not know the play and never would, put his hand over his mouth and felt his face wet under it.

Somewhere in the dark a man let his match go out. Then the house came down. It was not applause, not at first. It was the sound a building makes when it has been holding its breath for forty-seven years and stops.

The chime sounded. The voice — the box's voice, joined and piecemeal, back in its cabinet — said, "Stand — clear — of — the — closing — doors."

He did not stand clear. He went for the gap as the doors came together and reached it a quarter of a second late; the rubber edges met in front of his face, and through the scratched glass he saw the stage tilt and dim and fold away into iron and street lamps and the flat tarred roof of the Harmon Street laundromat, with a pigeon asleep on its ventilator.

The train moved off. It was eleven minutes late into the terminus, which was not unusual.

---

They found no one under the trestle at Harmon Street, nor on the laundromat roof, nor in any hospital in the city. The police asked Arvid the same four questions on four separate occasions, and he gave the same four answers, because they were true, and in the end a sergeant with bad teeth and good manners wrote missing, no evidence of foul play on a form and told him to go home and get some sleep. Her sister came from Milwaukee and took the framed playbill and nothing else. The second teapot she poured down the sink without a word, and Arvid, carrying boxes, did not say anything either.

The box on Ninth Street was inspected by a contractor, who found nothing wrong with it. The closed stations did not come back. The ten-past-three ran empty and blazing over the river and said the names of the living stations, and they were only names.

But the voice has changed, a little. Arvid is the only one who has noticed, because Arvid is the only one who listens. When it tells the city to stand clear of the closing doors there is a breath now at the start of the phrase that was not there before, the small intake of a woman about to make an entrance. And once in a while, on the ten-past-three, between Ninth Street and Harmon, the chime sounds when there is no station to announce, and nothing follows it at all, the way a theatre goes quiet just before the curtain.

The dentist in Tasmania took the knight at last and resigned four moves later, writing only that he had always known it was poisoned and had taken it to see whether Arvid had the nerve to prove it.

On the ten-past-three, over the black river, Arvid Toomey stands up, very large in his orange vest, and stands clear of the closing doors, as instructed.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum Nōnās Octōbrēs (2 October 2026), ā Friderīcō Leiberō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Fritz Leiber, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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