Follow Me Down

by Gordon MacKinney

  “You’re letting me off the hook mighty easy.”

  “I am?”

  I lifted my hands and gestured around us. “It’s this place. You’re distracted.”

  “But we’ve been in way older places.” For a moment, Reuben lost himself in a thought. Then he said, “It’s the isolation, like being on another planet. Kind of gets to you.”

  We picked up Andy. He’d stood watch long enough to rule out followers.

  I’d chosen the photo-shoot location in advance by studying the blueprints. The Rookwood station would give me everything I needed to compose images worth publishing in the local press, photos that might wake the citizens of Cincinnati from their stupor.

  When we arrived, every eye-catching architectural feature was as I’d hoped: arched support columns lined up like paraders, an infinite straightaway to the east, a gently curving tunnel to the west, and a filigreed marble staircase rising out of sight.

  Reuben sniffed the air, testing. I met his eyes. He shook his head.

  “Me neither,” I said, and we shared a moment of relief. No stink damp, not yet.

  I swapped out the film, careful to seal our progress in a lightproof aluminum film can. I loaded up Kodachrome-X sixty-four ASA, crisp, bright, and thirsty for light. Reuben extended the tripod, screwed on the camera, and gave Andy a crash course in blind photography with the shutter locked open.

  I worked on composition, starting with a photo I’d been arranging in my mind for days. It was to be a classic one-third, two-thirds ratio, naturally balanced for the mind and pleasing for the eye. The left third would feature the stone staircase rising up, and the right two-thirds a platoon of sentry columns vanishing into infinite blackness.

  The photo would need excellent depth of field, crisply focused both up close and far away, and that required a tight aperture on the lens and lots of light. But this time, the light would be rainbowed, great gorgeous Technicolor splashes with each firing of the flash.

  I’d thought long and hard about palette. The gray of concrete was inevitable, so I wouldn’t fight it, but work with it. The perfect complement would be cool blues and purples and the endless violet variations in between. For the flash unit, I’d brought a set of glassine filters with every anticipated hue.

  We doused our flashlights. Reuben opened the shutter. I groped along in the dark—no penlights that might streak the film with exposure. I fired, recharged, swapped out filters, cleared my bleached vision, and kept moving. Each composition took ten or fifteen minutes. For the last photo, I fumbled down the lightless straightaway until my fingertips stung from abrasion, as I fired through a lineup of filters. Before long, I was a half-mile from my friends and felt as if I were standing on the dark side of the moon. Throughout the shoot, I’d visualized my creation: a depiction of man’s journey from birth to death—ambitious, the way art’s supposed to be.

  . . . . .

  Following the map in my brain, we journeyed southeast past the Avondale and Tippin Street stations to reach the straightaway Alfred had described, the one with the possible fifth spur. From a bird’s eye view, we’d pass close to the Ohio River and a greater risk of airborne toxins.

  Reuben took point. I hung close behind with Andy. We ambled down the most gradual of inclines, almost imperceptible, but I had no doubt where a marble placed on the floor would roll.

  Without warning, Reuben’s outstretched arm clotheslined me in the chest. He’d stopped dead in his tracks and backed up on the double, taking Andy and me with him.

  “I smelled stink damp,” he sputtered, breathless. “No doubt.”

  I sniffed to test. No rotten egg aroma. “I don’t. False alarm?”

  Reuben’s mind zoomed ahead, leaving Andy and me blinking. “I knew the air down here was still, but not this still.”

  “I don’t get it,” I said.

  He lifted the lanyard and penny over his head. “Get out your scope.” I did. Reuben wadded the chain into a clump and tossed it forward with a softball underhand. Then he trained his flashlight’s beam toward the foreground twenty feet out. I rotated the ring on the scope for close targeting. The penny came into view, a speck of a circle but clear enough. The copper surface transformed with undulating bands of color—violet, blue, green—like a sheen of motor oil on calm water.

  I passed the telescope to Reuben. “Why did you smell it and we didn’t? You were only a few feet up ahead.”

  “Up ahead, yeah, plus I’m shorter,” he explained. “I dipped into it first.”

  Andy made a quizzical expression.

  Reuben elaborated. “There’s zero air movement down here, so when hydrogen sulfide settles in the low spots, it’s like a pond of water. Keep your head above the surface and life goes on. Dip below, like I started to, and you drown in poison. The difference between life and death can be inches.”

  Andy absorbed our ghastly analysis with his usual stoicism, and I wondered if I was witnessing some cultural Teflon, a shield against war’s emotional battering.

  “Come to think of it,” I said, “this is the closest we’ve been to the river.”

  Reuben reached a conclusion with a single nod. “The copper doesn’t lie. Looks like Blumenfeld’s mystery spur will remain a mystery. Let’s back out of here.”

  “Not so fast,” I countered. “I know a detour.”

  . . . . .

  In twelve minutes, after passing through two transit tunnels and three service passages, we arrived at the north end of Alfred’s straightaway. Above us, Adolphus Avenue. Ahead of us in the darkness, a fifth spur—maybe.

  To find it, we progressed the length slowly, eyeballing not only the west wall as Alfred had instructed, but every flat and crease we could see. We soon reached the Ptarmigan Street Station, the stairs rising to the steel understructure of a road. I couldn’t help but think of the breach that killed Delbert Turkel—the groan of buckling metal, the ground rising up, the walls of the excavator’s cab folding in on Turkel’s chest until the next breath couldn’t come.

  Along the way, we’d encountered no spur, no openings whatsoever, not even a ground-level rat passage.

  “Alfred got played,” Reuben said. “Or he played us.”

  I shook my head. “If you were there when he mentioned it, you’d know. For whatever reason, this is no joke for Blumenfeld.”

  I started back in the direction we’d come, but this time hugged the west side. Reuben and Andy followed close, Andy curious, Reuben fidgety.

  Around midpoint between the two stations, I pressed my flashlight against the wall and exposed the surface like sunrise across a plain. Tiny cones of shadow trailed pimples in the concrete.

  “There.” I pointed with my chin. “It’s irregular. Andy, hold this.”

  He took over flashlight duty as I caressed the wall until brushing a half-inch wide indentation. It ran in a vertical line about eight inches long. I tested a hunch and felt a similar line about a foot and a half to the side. I was touching the outer dimensions of a good-sized brick embedded in the wall.

  “This façade is some kind of filler over cinderblock,” I said. “That’s weird. The entire subway is poured concrete, but not here.”

  “Meaning?” Reuben asked, even though he knew what it meant—he was growing testy.

  I scratched my chin. “It means this was added later, with lots of hard work to make it invisible and hide whatever’s behind it.”

  “We take no picture?” Andy asked.

  But we had to. Explorers were supposed to work past an obstacle, not retreat from it.

  I mapped our progress to the memorized blueprint and thrust an index finger. “There’s a service passage entrance
by the stairs at Adolphus. A back door maybe?”

  Except for the rare crossover from one artery to another, service passages ran parallel to the main transit tunnels. We could loop around to enter the spur from behind.

  My assumptions panned out, taking us through a three-foot-wide service passage for about a minute before reaching the unexpected: a gate. With vertical bars four inches apart and mortared into the ceiling and floor, the frame wasn’t going anywhere. The gate itself, however, gave me hope. It hung from three sturdy hinges on one side and a lock on the other with a key mechanism I’d seen before. It dated to the first half of the century and could be sprung with the right tools.

  A lesson from the journals of N. Jefferson Chapel, explorer extraordinaire: Take pause before stowing locksmithing accoutrement in your attaché. If apprehended, your avowal of innocence will fail, for those who carry the kit of a criminal will be availed as such.

  But on this occasion, I’d ignored Mr. Chapel. If we were caught in the forbidden subway, no avowal of innocence would save our criminal butts.

  I retrieved my locksmith’s tools from my pack, plucked a number fourteen, worked the keyhole for thirty seconds, and click—the gate opened like the arms of the one true love. Andy was impressed. Reuben wasn’t.

  “Dust clogs the steel stops,” he said. “A good whack probably would’ve done it.” Killjoy.

  We advanced, with me on point. In less than a minute, my hunch proved right. Obviously, we’d paralleled the main transit tunnel because we emerged behind the makeshift wall. Except on this side there was no stucco veneer, only bare cinderblock expertly masoned into permanence. We swept our flashlights to the right and revealed the spur’s unlikely contents: wooden crates constructed of roughhewn lumber, and lots of them.

  “What the hell?” Reuben said. Andy’s eyes widened.

  I thought of an old Rory Calhoun western where the bad guys sold repeating rifles to the Indians, their contraband transported on flatbed wagons in similar crates. Still, these were bigger, six or seven feet long, and a couple of feet wide and deep. If they contained armaments, these were big guns indeed.

  The crates had been arranged neatly, five side-by-side to form a row, and five rows stacked to the ceiling. Twenty-five crates to a stack.

  But how many stacks? I shined my flashlight down the narrow walkway separating the pile from the rightmost wall. The beam petered out before reaching the far end of the spur. “There might be hundreds of them.”

  I rapped on the side of one crate, hoping for a revealing reverberation, but learned nothing. “Sure as hell isn’t subway construction equipment.” I swatted at possibilities in my mind. “Piping maybe, or I-beams? But never packaged like this, as if for a cross-country trip.”

  Reuben shot me a glare. “You can’t break into them.”

  I pressed my lips tight before saying, “We couldn’t photograph between the bars of the gate like Alfred wanted. The gate was an opaque wall.”

  “Your point being?” Reuben had begun circling my argument, looking for vulnerabilities.

  But I plunged ahead, making things up on the fly. “We had to improvise at the locked gate, so… now we’ve entered a period of improvisation.” I winced. Sounded weak to me too.

  Reuben dismissively waved his hands in the air. “You’ll do whatever you want anyway.”

  I wasn’t going to come this far, technically break the law multiple times, and then settle for a souvenir photo of the outside of some wooden boxes. But would I tell Alfred about the contents? That depended on what we found inside.

  I took off solo. Reuben stayed put. So did Andy, looking like a kid adrift between quarreling parents. I turned my body sideways to fit through the passage, the stacks at my chest and wall at my back. Humming the refrain from There Goes My Baby, I tapped containers as I walked, counting, and scanned the ground before me for something that might serve as a pry tool.

  By the end of the spur, I’d tapped thirty-one stacks, which totaled seven hundred seventy-five crates. If they contained weapons, there were enough for a battalion.

  I crossed over behind the stacks and headed toward my friends via the other side of the spur. Along the way, I grabbed a greasy wooden handle jutting from the dust and flecks of concrete. It was a screwdriver, a medium Phillips with mangled teeth. A flathead would’ve been better, but as Dad used to say, generals strategize, soldiers improvise.

  “You’re crossing a line,” Reuben said upon my approach.

  I scaled two rows of crates like massive ladder rungs and peered down at him. “We crossed a line when we dialed a stolen code and trespassed on phone company property.” What was that old expression? In for a penny, in for a pound. Too stuffy. I tried my own variation. “Why settle for a bite when you can eat the whole cheeseburger?”

  Reuben glowered. Andy blinked.

  I kept climbing until I reached the top. On hands and knees, I perched about six inches below the sandpapery ceiling, studying the crate below me. Splintery slats ran the length, each maybe three or four inches wide and anchored with nails, not screws, which meant my crude pry tool might buy me a peek inside.

  I wedged the Phillips and gave it a pull. A finger-sized chunk of wood burst into shards. The slat hadn’t budged.

  I placed my flashlight on the adjacent crate and pointed the beam toward my work space. I shifted to a sturdier slat and tried again. The nail screeched. I adjusted my angle, yanked, and opened a gap large enough to wedge in my fingers. I pulled up hard. Crack.

  “Success,” I said, but heard no reply. Reuben was probably pouting, while Andy hunkered down in the DMZ between combatants.

  The slat had broken somewhere down by my knees, creating a shadowed opening a few inches wide and a couple of feet long.

  “If you tell me you’re not curious, you’re lying through your teeth.” I reached for my flashlight and caught a whiff of air freed from the depths of the crate—dusty and dead, like a tree stump so old and petrified the bacteria had given up. I shined the beam into the gap.

  Two black eyes like bottomless holes in the earth stared back at me. But instead of the rodent eyes of the rat I’d laid to rest under a shrub, these eyes were human.

  I sucked in air and lurched up with all the strength in my abdomen. The back of my head struck the rock-hard ceiling with a force I felt in my earlobes. I saw stars and toppled forward into a lightless pool.

  . . . . .

  “Lucas!” The voice was Reuben’s, sounding a mile away. “You okay?”

  I blinked my eyes open but saw nothing, only darkness. I breathed in a stale scent, like an old canvas tent after years in the shed. I winced at pain in my cheeks, a sharp edge on both sides, as if elevator doors had closed on my face.

  Then I remembered. A dead body, a visage, those vacant eyes. I jerked both arms into push-up position and heaved. Wood splinters pierced my palms. I rose and freed my face from the opening in the slats, abrading my cheeks in the process.

  After knocking myself stupid, I’d been an inch or maybe a millimeter from the corpse, eye to eye in the dark, or eye to empty socket—I didn’t want to know how close, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to check.

  Reuben’s head popped up above the edge of the crate. I wanted to reach out and clutch his arm, his head, anything. But he was busy and businesslike, directing his flashlight, exploring the gap I’d temporarily occupied.

  “No wonder these crates are bigger,” he said, as if remarking about a rock formation.

  “Bigger than what?” I said with a cracked voice between gulps of air.

  Reuben assessed me and clapped my shoulder. “You’ll be okay. Bigger than a coffin, that’s what. They each hold two bodies. Maybe more underne
ath. See?”

  “No, I don’t want to see.”

  “There’s a pair of feet next to the guy’s head.”

  I rolled away as if doing so might erase my memory. But I would never forget. The hair a spray of dusty wire. The toothy mouth twisted in a grimace of pain. The skin no longer skin, but an ashen membrane stretched over skull like leather on a saddle.

  I swallowed back a wave of nausea. “They were true all along.”

  “What were?”

  “The stories—when we were kids.” I squeezed my scraped cheeks between both hands. “Corpses stacked like cord wood.”

  CHAPTER 14

  As I lay in bed, my leg muscles spasmed and my brain swirled with unwanted images. I’d gotten home after four a.m. and resigned myself to insomnia. I stared at the ceiling and imagined what I would demand from Alfred. My eyelids drooped a few times, but shot open at a recurring scene: a ragged corpse, spring-loaded at the waist, popping up in a cloud of dust.

  With the last wake-up nightmare, I swore Alfred would receive nothing from us—no film, no help, no nothing—not until he coughed up answers. Why were hundreds of bodies discarded in the old subway like so much human inventory? Was Drax somehow involved? Why did Alfred apparently know about them? What else hadn’t he told me about our half-baked mission to topple Drax?

  A chair scraped the kitchen floor and I glanced at my alarm clock. Almost eight a.m. I had to get moving to catch Alfred at the studio before the day’s shoots swallowed him up.

  I showered, shaved, and pulled on clean pants and a tennis shirt Mom had ironed, even though it came from the dryer wrinkle-free. I didn’t mind. In her on-again, off-again state, pointless motion was better than no motion at all.

  I entered the kitchen. Seeing Mom in the morning was hard. She’d always been the early riser in our family, first to greet with a smile and some comment about the plan for the day, her eyes sparkling. But that light had dimmed.