Follow Me Down

by Gordon MacKinney

  “One more thing,” I said.

  Alfred peered up, his hands ten-and-two on the wheel, knuckles like marbles under cracked leather.

  “Does Tricia know we’re going into the subway?”

  Alfred looked surprised. “Tricia?” He shook his head at the absurdity of my question. “She barely knows a Polaroid from an Instamatic.”

  I buried a smile. Clever girl.

  . . . . .

  Mom usually fell asleep thirty minutes after taking her nighttime dosages, but not this evening. Her hands were burning up, another side effect of tapering off the drugs. The doctors called it akathisia. Mom called it torture, as if a colony of parasites marauded under her skin. Lying back on the pillow, she stretched and flexed and wrung, her fingers individually manic. Her breath came in short bursts, eyes wide with agony.

  I sat on the edge of the bed, took her hands in mine and kneaded them, firmly at first but then gentler as the meds short-circuited her synapses. After fifteen minutes, her eyelids settled and she slept. I eased her hands to the bed covers as if placing a needle on a record.

  That night, I dreamed I was in an underground void with unknown danger to my left and right. Survival lay beyond the darkness where a sky-blue orb hung barely above the horizon. My father stood between me and the distant portal, his slim body sideways, his silhouette recognizable by a noble nose and dense stack of hair. He turned toward me for a few seconds before shifting his attention to the blue ball. I had to reach him, but how long could he wait for me?

  I took one step and then another, unsteady on my feet. I peered down at ebony slickness stretching from my boots to where the dim light failed. The floor undulated as if a million fist-sized organisms beneath the glossy membrane battled each other for another inch of space. I broke into a run, the unseen creatures shrieking and crunching under my feet. Ahead, my father ran too, but away from me, toward the blue beacon. I stopped and my father stopped as well. I took a single step, testing, and Dad mimicked my movement. Desperate, I bent at the waist and sprinted. Dad did the same, the distance between us never narrowing.

  I awoke to find myself in the easy chair across from my mother’s bed, the same chair I’d slept in after Dad died. I’d been there to comfort her—or at least that was my rationalization.

  “I needed you, Mom,” I whispered. “More than you needed me.” But my mother was asleep, breathing softly. Her right hand paddled under the bed sheet every few seconds.

  I shivered. My dream had left me coated in sweat, and it had left me with dread, wedged like a ten-pound stone into my rib cage.

  Out in the living room, before I could stop myself, I picked up the phone and called Tricia.

  “Do you realize what time it is?” she said, her voice hushed and jagged from sleep. Her throat constricted as she stretched. An image flashed in my mind, shallow streams of muscle flowing the lengths of her calves and thighs. Her sloping exhale ended with her workaday voice. “What do you want?”

  “I—I need to know why he’s going after Drax.”

  “No you don’t. Just take the measurements.”

  “See, that’s my point. You know things, like the measurements, which were supposed to be secret. I’m putting my neck on the block for that guy.”

  “No, you’re running an errand.” She spoke as if I were a slow child.

  “If we’re caught, jail would be the least of my problems,” I said. “Drax could go after my family.” I thought of my mother, asleep, under the gaze of an intruder. A chill climbed my spine. “I have to know why it’s so important to him.”

  “Can this wait? I have to get up early to stock shelves before opening time.”

  I felt I was banging my head against a cinderblock wall. “He’s your grandfather. He’s always been part of your life.”

  “Wrong. He’s like a parole officer. I don’t care what he does.”

  The handset felt hot against my ear. “Bullshit, Tricia. You’re always saying I don’t care and I don’t want to know, but then you snoop around behind his back. He thinks you know nothing about this—this project.”

  “That’s the way I like it.”

  “Why keep secrets from him? What’s he holding over your head?”

  Tricia said nothing. I decided to try a different appeal, from beneath her, peering up. I lowered my voice to a near-whisper. “Look, I know I’m a fuck-up.”

  “Join the crowd.”

  “You’re not a fuck-up. You run that shop like a real pro.”

  She sighed. “I mean join the crowd of people who know you’re a fuck-up. Hang on a minute.” I heard sounds of her telephone handset in motion, muffling against skin, brushing against fabric. I imagined her shrugging into a bathrobe, her breasts shifting beneath the terrycloth. A door clicked closed. Was she with someone? Had she exited the bedroom so she wouldn’t wake him?

  Her voice returned at regular volume. “Listen up, Lucas. If what I’m about to tell you comes around again, from Chuckles or the other guys, I’ll mess you up.” Her tone had the cold clarity of a steel blade.

  “You don’t need to threaten me.” I paused a second. “You can trust me.” I hoped she believed me. I meant it.

  She cleared her throat. “I got in trouble a few years back. Did some bad things. Don’t ask me what because I’ll never say. The judge gave me a choice—prison or full-time employment in the family business, under close supervision. My dad owned a Sunoco station.”

  “That’s a no-brainer.”

  “But my parents said lock her up and teach her a lesson. Alfred took me in.”

  “So you must’ve had a good relationship with him.”

  Tricia gave a dry laugh. “No one in my family had a good relationship with him. They pushed him away. Still do.”

  “Even his kids?”

  “Kid—my dad. They talk once a year during Yom Kippur.”

  “I don’t get it. Alfred’s a control freak, but he’s not a monster.”

  “Not always.”

  If only temporarily, Tricia was no longer Trix, the high school renegade with the rainbow hair and go-to-hell glance. No longer the buttoned-up professional with disregard for anyone but a paying customer.

  “That’s why I’m twenty-seven years old and have a legal guardian.” She gave a bitter laugh. “Looks like we have something in common after all—Alfred has both of us by the balls. If you don’t cooperate, you land in jail. Same as me.”

  She was right. We shared the same need-hate relationship with the old man, and therefore the same motivation to get the upper hand. I tried again. “What did Drax do to him?”

  Another pause. I pictured her mouth a millimeter from the phone. In the dead stillness of the night, I heard her lips brush the mouthpiece. “Don’t tell him I told you.”

  “You’ve got my word on it.”

  “For what it’s worth.”

  That stung. “I’ve never done anything to hurt you.”

  She countered without missing a beat. “Forget about it. Drax destroyed his career as a photojournalist—made sure no publication would hire him.”

  “Why?”

  “Does it matter? Business is a jungle, and businesspeople are predators. Here’s my advice. Have fun underground doing whatever you do, take the damn measurements, and get on with your life.”

  My life. For what it’s worth. “Can I trust him if we get in a jam?”

  “Maybe, maybe not. Like I said, he’s my parole officer.”

  “You’re not helping much.”

  “That’s not my job.”

  . . . . .

  Like every Cinc
innati kid, I grew up hearing subway lore, from the plausible to the absurd. The big kids told the little kids that the subway’s trapped air carried cancer like pollen. That the tunnels contained warring colonies of rats as big as toasters. That one spur, a dead-end tunnel, housed “corpses stacked like cord wood.” That last story was never told without those five ominous words, turning our skin to ice.

  And every Cincinnati kid knew the story of Emily Langford because it was taught in schools to terrify us into obedience.

  The Great Depression struck. With the subway’s concrete barely dry, public transportation money shifted to other needs, like food and shelter for a desperate population. City leaders voted to mothball the underground system. Transit workers bolted iron gates over street-level entrances to dissuade the curious from venturing down.

  But even as early as the 1930s, my predecessors in off-limits exploration worked their way into forbidden places. The underground sang a siren’s song, and the iron gates were no match.

  In 1945, the year World War II ended, a nine-year-old girl followed a group of these explorers into the depths. Emily Langford’s tiny frame squeezed easily through gaps widened by the leaders. She trailed them for a time, unnoticed, before detouring solo toward Ludlow Avenue Station. She became lost among the straightaways, junctions, and dead-end spurs. Desperation eroding her judgment, she crawled into the narrower maintenance passages used to service the transit tunnels. Before long, her flashlight batteries expired and darkness entombed her.

  Days later, rescue crews found her body curled into a ball on a tiny patch of dusty concrete. The cause of death might’ve been dehydration or exposure—I don’t recall—but the rumor mill preferred a more sensational explanation, that terror had squeezed the life from her heart. Even as a young kid, I had imagined Emily, with dirt-covered knees and a rumpled dress, crying out in vain from that black pit of hell.

  If little Emily had been a poor man’s kid like me, the public might’ve brushed off the tragedy. But her uncle was a city councilman with ambition and press connections, and his cry of anguish echoed across the Seven Hills. In turn, opportunistic journalists milked the incident for peak circulation, with sensational headlines like Subterranean Terror, Treading on Our Innocents, and The Shame beneath Our Feet. A politician confided to an associate at a city council meeting, unaware of a live WKRC microphone nearby. “One can’t help but wonder if the girl quite literally screamed herself to death,” he said, and the city shuddered as one.

  The mayor, with the wet-eyed councilman hovering over his shoulder, appealed to a primetime TV audience. “Never again. Our children must be protected. The relic subway must be sealed.”

  And sealed it was, tighter than a tomb. Wherever possible, road crews paved over street-level entrances. Elsewhere, welders affixed steel plates “as thick as the hulls of oil tanker,” an excessive mandate of a city ordinance scribbled by panicky politicians. Nobody, the authorities declared, would enter the subway again.

  CHAPTER 11

  By the time subway access required acetylene torches, the underground had become off-limits. But Alfred had learned about a surviving utility portal, so only one thing stood between us and El Dorado: a plan. “A good job is only as good as your plan,” Dad once chided me when I was a teenager. I’d assembled a bed in the living room, only to realize I couldn’t fit it through the bedroom doorway.

  For any first-time infiltration, Reuben and I usually divided up the planning tasks, with me in charge of getting us in and out, and Mr. Science in charge of keeping us alive in between, researching toxic fungi, explosive gases, and other natural or man-made nastiness.

  We rendezvoused at the YMCA to compare progress. After running the indoor track and heaving medicine balls, we seized a corner table in the canteen and spread out our notes.

  “We need a spotter,” Reuben announced.

  “You’re nuts. How do we train somebody in three days?”

  “Train?” Reuben rocked back in his chair and planted hands on hips. His forehead glistened with sweat. “Hey, newbie, holler if anyone follows us. There, I just gave the entire training.”

  “We’re not roping a plebe into this. Wouldn’t be fair to him.” I tapped a stack of notes. “What’d you find out?”

  “You go first,” Reuben said, but something in his obtuse expression left me uneasy.

  “We go at midnight, late enough for quiet streets, but not too late for a couple of students with their backpacks to be heading home after studying.”

  “Sounds reasonable.”

  “And we drive.”

  Reuben frowned. “License plates guarantee I’m identified, unless you’re planning on buying a car for the first time in your life.”

  I couldn’t afford a Hot Wheel and Reuben knew it. “Buses are spotty after midnight and riders get noticed. We’ll park in a residential neighborhood and walk the last half-mile.”

  That seemed to satisfy him. I continued, feeling a bit like the eager lieutenant at the colonel’s briefing. “Alfred wants the first descent to be a trial run. A few measurements to let Smith validate his triangulations. If they add up, we go back and shoot the rest.”

  I wasn’t ready to tell Reuben about Alfred’s “favor.” No reason to stoke his anxiety when the mystery spur probably didn’t exist.

  I also didn’t mention photography equipment. Reuben didn’t care anyway. But I did. Earlier, I’d thrown a Hail Mary pass and petitioned Alfred for the Hasselblad. “Would you send Sir Edmund Hillary to the peak of Everest with a flea market camera?”

  Alfred had flashed the smile of a superior. “Forget it, and you can forget about the Leica too.”

  I’d left his office determined to find a creative solution. I wasn’t about to trust the greatest photo shoot of my life to the old Yashica.

  “Okay, no more stalling,” I asked Reuben. “What’d you find out?”

  He gathered himself up. “Every man-made tunnel from Anchorage to Zanzibar is ventilated. The subway isn’t, and hasn’t been for decades.”

  “I know that.”

  “Gases accumulate.”

  “I also know that.” I wiped my face with a gym towel that smelled like the inside of a suitcase. “What gases?”

  Reuben held a thumb aloft. “Methane, for one. Flammable as hell.”

  I shrugged. “Any cave can naturally accumulate methane.” I was tipping toward an idiotic argument, that natural meant benign, as if rabies from a raccoon was less fatal because the furry rascals had such adorable faces. “So we avoid open flames. No big deal.”

  “Oh really? So no use of unapproved electrical devices that might generate a spark,” he said, his sarcasm splashing, “like a laser soldered together in some geek’s basement?”

  “The Ohio State physics lab is no Romper Room—”

  Reuben cut me off with an open palm, the attitude gone. “A little methane is nothing compared to our biggest problem.”

  I tensed and waited.

  “Hydrogen sulfide.”

  My stomach lurched. “But the subway should be dry.”

  Reuben shook his head. “It would be, if it were maintained.”

  I swallowed hard. “Sewer gas? You sure?”

  “It’s a sealed chamber branching close to the Ohio River, and that means ready moisture, and that means organics, and that means decades of anaerobic digestion.”

  Again I said nothing, this time waiting for a usable explanation.

  “Which means poison gas,” Reuben said, “maybe enough to arm a regiment.” An apt comparison; the British fired canisters of the stuff into trenches in World War I, the enemy’s gas masks useless against it.

  Dark
and dank places with static air contain plenty of gaseous hazards, including ammonia, methane, carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen oxide. But none of these strike fear in the hearts of urban explorers like hydrogen sulfide for one key reason: it methodically disarms the victim’s natural defenses.

  Also known as stink damp, hydrogen sulfide reeks like rotten eggs, but not for long, as the gas kills the victim’s sense of smell. The stench seems to vanish. Fooled into complacency, the victim becomes disoriented and dizzy. Memory fails. Judgment fails. A clear mind would order the body to run to save itself. But the afflicted mind swears the danger is gone, or perhaps was never there. Effects could hit in seconds.

  In September 1968, the bodies of three London adventurers were found beneath Dumfries, their faces inexplicably serene. The postmortem revealed hydrogen sulfide poisoning. With presence of mind, they would’ve found safe air and survival a two-minute crawl away.

  Reuben scratched his chin. “I can put up with a lot. Crawlspaces, dripping acid, rats up my pants leg. But not stink damp.”

  I didn’t need to remind Reuben of one more sinister characteristic of hydrogen sulfide. Heavier than normal air, it collects down low. The upper half of a still chamber can be as safe as a nursery. But drop down to crawl and you might never get up.

  “We plan our route super carefully,” I said. “Steer clear of the river.”

  . . . . .

  I showered off the workout while Reuben stayed behind with a blank page, a ready pencil, and a pronounced V at the center of his forehead.

  I reemerged twenty minutes later, having failed to unknot my stressed shoulder muscles with near-scalding jets from the shower head. Reuben no longer sat at our table, but our paperwork remained. The room was vacant and cluttered as if evacuated in a rush. I followed the sound of whooping and jeering coming from down the hall. I pulled up behind Reuben and a circle of spectators.

  On the floor of the lobby between burnt orange vinyl sofas, a small Asian man I recognized pressed the cheek of a big Teuton to the scuffed tile.