Simwan tried one more time to entice the musician to respond to them, but by now Mr. Everywhere would not even meet his eyes. His body was still present, but it was as if the rest of him had gone elsewhere, if not everywhere. His efforts defeated, Simwan turned to his sisters.
“I guess we’re going to Central Park.”
The girls were not entirely disappointed. The park was on their list of things to see while they were in New York. This way they could see it while they were hunting for the Crub, and recovering the Truth, and saving their mother.
Crossing under and over and up again, they arrived just in time to catch the next northbound train. The girls insisted on riding in the lead car. From there they could look out its front window and watch the gloriously bright multicolored signal lights come racing toward the train. Simwan was content to surrender his place to them, choosing to relax on a seat with Pithfwid curled up in his lap, listening to the rattle and rumble of the train as it sped along its track.
It being the middle of the morning on a work day, the train was far from crowded. Most of the passengers had gravitated toward the middle cars, which would save them a few steps to the street once they reached their respective stops. The only other occupant of the front car was a fat man in a heavy twill overcoat and matching hat. He sat near the back of the car reading the Times. The dog whose leash the man kept wrapped around his right hand was a plug of a pug: short, tenacious, curious, flat-faced, and bright-eyed. It barked twice in Pithfwid’s direction until its owner absently shushed it.
Near Simwan and Pithfwid, the Deavy coubet was laughing and gesturing delightedly as signal light after signal light came rushing toward them, only to sweep past in a blur of green or yellow. Reds were also visible, but off to right or left, signifying tracks that were closed for maintenance or other purposes. From time to time the train stopped to take on or disembark passengers. The front car remained unpopular, which suited Simwan fine.
“Now that’s different.” Rose practically had her nose pressed up against the thick pane of safety glass. Her warm breath condensed against the window, a puff of life. Amber crowded close on one side of her, N/Ice on the other.
“I see it,” confirmed Amber. “There are two red lights together, but they look like they’re right in front of us.”
“They probably are right in front of us,” opined N/Ice, “and we’re going to go around a curve and miss them.”
But they didn’t go around a curve. The twin red lights drew closer and closer, until it seemed they were going to smash into the front of the train. The faint echo of mild cursing could be heard coming from the driver’s insulated compartment: a security-sealed, windowless alcove immediately to the right of the girls and their window. Then the twin lights shot on past, on the left side of the train, and the way ahead showed normal again. That is, it did until the red lights reappeared. They were quite large: much larger than the usual track signaling lights.
And this time they were not in front of the train, but racing along parallel to it, on its left side.
Something struck the train with a solid boom. In the cars behind them, Simwan could hear people scream and curse. Looking back through the window located at the rear of the front car and through to the one next in line, he saw people scrambling to regain their seats. Since the train didn’t stop, they assumed that the jolting episode was over and done with, its unknown cause behind them now. To an individual, they were more angry than frightened. The only exception was the heavyset man sitting in the rear of the front car. He was gawking out a left-side window as if paralyzed. His pet pug had jumped up on the hard plastic bench seat. Whimpering piteously, it was trying to force its way between the seat and its master’s back.
A hiss came from Pithfwid. Hair bottled, the cat had leaped up to stand on the bench and glare out the window. Spinning around on the seat, Simwan found himself looking directly at the two bright red lights that continued to parallel the train. Except they weren’t lights.
They were eyes.
Big now, big as bus wheels, bright fiery red with cup-size inky black pupils, they glowered back at him, full of malevolent intelligence. They were only the highlights of a nightmare head that was the front end of a garish, cylindrical, segmented body a hundred feet long. From each segment thrust a pair of short, pointed, shiny black legs that moved so fast they were little more than a blur. Working in tandem, dozens and dozens of them provided the means that allowed the segmented atrocity to keep pace with the train.
Simwan flinched back as for a second time the monster slammed sideways into the car. More screams from the other cars, accompanied by loud demands for the driver to do something. Emergency stop buttons were pushed, to no avail. Connections between the other cars and the driver’s compartment had been damaged. Within that cubicle of isolation the driver frantically studied the readouts on his console and struggled to decide what to do next. Her instruments showed nothing amiss. According to them the train was racing along nicely on its track at its proper, predesignated speed. There was nothing to show that twice now it had nearly been knocked off its rails. External cameras indicated quite clearly that it was alone in the tunnel. Apart from the two inexplicable jolts, all was as it should be. Accordingly, she saw no reason to slow down, much less brake to an emergency stop and back up the entire line all the way to the tip of the island.
It wasn’t the driver’s fault, Simwan knew. She was Ord and so was her equipment. Neither could detect the gigantic, frothing, centipedelike thing that was hurtling up the tunnel alongside the train, nor could the other passengers. The exception was the poor retired gentleman who had the misfortune to be seated in the same car as the Deavy brood, and who involuntarily and greatly to his distress found himself partaking of their perception.
“Do something!” Simwan yelled at himself as much as at the coubet. Another strong shove might well knock the train off its track and send it crashing into the tunnel walls. By this time the pug’s whimpering had given way to steady wailing. Between the sight of those burning red eyes so close to the window glass and the dog’s unremitting howling, it was hard to think properly.
What were the right words for disposing of giant bugs? No, that wouldn’t necessarily work, he told himself. The monster that threatened the train was buglike but not like any bug he had ever seen. What about the spell his mom used when she wanted to fumigate the basement? It worked for getting rid of ants and spiders and silverfish. Would it work on something this big and relentless? There was always the charm he used to clear his computer of worms, but this was decidedly larger and more powerful than any computer worm.
While he fought to think of something, the beast lunged a third time at the train, throwing its fast-moving bulk against the line of cars. This time, however, Pithfwid was ready for it, even if his humans were not. The cat spat. Lightly radiant, his spittle penetrated the thick window glass to strike the monster square in one of its huge, glowing red eyes. Wrenching back, it let out an ear-splitting shriek that sounded exactly like the whistle of an oncoming train. It was loud enough to penetrate all the cars. Momentarily panicked, the other passengers whirled or strained for a look out the nearest window. Out the right side of the train they saw only the dark, mottled stone of the tunnel speeding past while out the other side it was much the same, except for what some thought was a line of pale, pale smoke hanging in the enclosed space.
Long, curving fangs wiped furiously at the injured eye in an attempt to clean it as the subterranean apparition continued to rocket along parallel to the train. Inhaling until he was twice, then three times his normal size, Pithfwid readied himself to spit again. At the back of the rattling front car the single Ord passenger continued to sit motionless, staring neither to left nor to right. His dog cowered behind him, alternately whimpering and wailing madly.
Then N/Ice was clambering onto the bench seat alongside her brother, between him and the front of the train.
While Simwan looked on uncertainly, but knowing from experience not to interfere, she stuck herself through the window until she was half in, half outside the speeding car. Leaning into the tunnel, the air rushing past causing her shoulder-length hair to blow wildly toward the rear of the train, she put her thumbs in her ears, waggled her fingers, and made taunting faces at the monster. Enraged, it snapped at her with its fangs. She pulled back sharply and the black, hook-shaped arcs of death scraped only the window. As the apparition resumed trying to soothe the eye where Pithfwid’s caustic spittle had landed, she pushed herself through the glass a second time. This go-round she hooked her right fingers into the upper part of her mouth and the fingers of her left hand into the lower, pulled her mouth apart, dislocated her jaw, bulged her eyes, made her tongue three feet long, and wagged it at the creature. One flaming red eye half-shut with pain, the enraged monster struck furiously at her again.
Only to vanish with an accompanying cry of surprise and outrage off to the left, down the side tunnel Rose and Amber had been chanting steadily to prise open for it.
“There!” More than satisfied with her effort, N/Ice drew her extraordinary tongue back into her head, let her upper jaw rejoin the lower, retracted her eyes back into her skull, and sat down on the seat. Raising both hands palm outward, she exchanged congratulatory high fives with her sisters and then a lesser, more decorous hand-paw smack with Pithfwid. She would have swapped similar congratulations with Simwan, except that he had risen from his seat and was heading down the center of the car toward its sole Ord occupant. Well, one of two, if you counted the dog.
“P-p-please,” the man was blubbering. Seriously staggered by what he had just seen and experienced, he tried to shrink back into his seat. This squashed the pug that had taken refuge there, causing it to yelp in panic. “Whatever you are, don’t hurt me! Please don’t!”
“Simulacrum othway restat,” Simwan murmured gently as he came near. “Treatis pardonai majestatus. You saw nothing. You see nothing. You remember nothing. All is as it was. All is as it should be.”
It was a good spell. A sound spell. He knew it was because he had once used it on his sixth-grade math teacher, Mrs. Apfelkopf, to make her forget that he had arrived late for a pop quiz. Upon learning of this, his father had used a spell of a different kind on him, one that had nothing to do with magic or math but everything to do with a soon-to-be-sore backside. In the long run, homework, the wincing younger Simwan had quickly determined, was decidedly less painful than using prohibited spells to casually smooth one’s way through an Ord world.
The older man’s eyes closed and he swayed slightly. While he was eye-closing and swaying, Simwan turned his attention to the poor dog. He didn’t have time to do anything about the spreading pool of urine on the seat, but he could calm down the pooch that had peed it.
“Woof,” Simwan elucidated reassuringly. “Woof woof, bark. Bark bark, arf, woof woof. Yip.”
As soon as Simwan ceased reciting, the man opened his eyes. Blinking and slightly dazed, he cast a tentative look at his surroundings. Nothing was amiss. The quartet of well-dressed youngsters who constituted the entirety of his fellow passengers was still clustered at the front of the car, the three girls (or was it two?) staring out the front window at the oncoming signal lights, the teenage boy sitting quietly petting the leashed cat in his lap as the train slowed on approach to the next station. It was the man’s stop. Rising to leave, he hesitated, then felt uncertainly of his coat’s hem. When his hand came away damp, he turned to glower and shake a disapproving finger at his stub-legged, snub-nosed companion.
“Bad dog, Lucius. Bad dog!” Using his newspaper (but careful to save the crossword page), he blotted up nearly all of the small pool of urine, and headed for the door. When the train stopped, he disembarked hurriedly, for some unknown reason feeling it was better not to gaze too long in the direction of the children who remained on board.
Within the sealed, locked driver’s compartment, a puzzled metro subway employee of seventeen years’ experience opened her report file, mulled over what to enter and how to word it, and finally decided to overlook the inexplicable incident altogether. Traveling over the same section of track, the train immediately behind hers was reporting everything normal. If one of the passengers filed a complaint about the two mysterious jolts her train had endured, then and only then would she feel compelled to respond. Otherwise, she decided, there were times in one’s life when it was best to pretend that nothing had happened, even when something patently had. Closing the file, she waited for the doors to sound the all clear preparatory to heading uptown to the next stop.
“What do you think it was?” An excited Rose queried her sisters and brother and pet. To look at her, to look at any of them, it was hard to imagine that they had nearly met catastrophe and death in the form of something massive and monstrous that dwelled only in the tunnels and deep places beneath the great city. But then, they were Deavys. And not just Deavys, but two-and-a-half twelve-year-olds and one sixteen-year-old and one very exceptional cat of indeterminate and indeterminable age.
“Not a bug,” Simwan declared with certainty. “That was my first thought. But definitely not a bug.”
“Maybe it was an Erdekönig. An Earth King.” Amber had always had a particular interest in all things that dwelled below the surface of the earth. “If they breed here, it would provide an explanation for a lot of the troubles the New York City subway system has gone through since they first started building it.”
“Maybe,” conceded N/Ice, “but me, I think it was more like a subgrub. If that was a larval stage, it makes me wonder what the adult form is like.”
“And what it does,” added Rose.
Simwan looked down at the furry ball that was once more curled up in his lap. “Pithfwid?” The girls went silent as the cat raised its head to look at them.
“Personally, I am more concerned about the why of the thing than the what of it. If Amber is right, then we just happened to board a train that just happened to run afoul of such an extraordinary vileness. On the other paw, if it was something sent by the Crub specifically to look for and then attack us, then that contemptible creature realizes we survived its assault under the Hudson, and also knows where we are now, more or less.” At the looks of concern that subsequently appeared on the faces of his humans, he added encouragingly, “Erdekönig, subgrub, or something else, I did not get the impression that our assailant was particularly intelligent. I don’t think it capable of reporting sensibly back to its master. That is assuming it has a master and that its assault was deliberate, and not merely coincidental. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, I think we may assume the latter. But while doing so,” he warned with a flick of his ears, “we should keep in mind the warning voiced by your estimable and loving uncle. That this city can be a dangerous place.” He glanced up at a concerned Simwan. “Based on our experiences of the past two days, the next time we have a long distance to travel, may I humbly suggest that we take the bus?”
The remainder of their ride uptown was unmemorable, which suited Simwan just fine. The underground attack had unnerved him more than he cared to admit, mostly because of what Pithfwid had hypothesized about it potentially having been commissioned by the Crub. The quiet ride gave the cat a chance to nap while the girls resumed their delighted ogling of the tunnel lights ahead. For the duration of the journey all of the lights—green, yellow, red, and otherwise—remained nothing more than signals set along the sides of the track. None leaped out at them; none sprang to the attack. At each stop, preoccupied Ord passengers shuffled on and off, ignoring the youngsters clustered at the front of the first car.
He was feeling a lot better by the time they got off at 59th Street.
Until he realized their next steps awaited them.
XI
Simwan felt Pithfwid tugging him forward as they came up the steps to the edge of the area known as Central Pa
rk South. Simwan continued to study their surroundings as he followed the feline’s lead. “What is it, Pithfwid? You see something?”
“Indeed I do,” the cat informed him. “I suggest we pursue our inquiries there.” Raising one paw, he pointed. Not far ahead up Fifth Avenue (the wide boulevard that separates the park from the line of hideously expensive apartment buildings to the east), a small cylindrical kiosk stood on the park side, like a nail emerging from an old board. Constructed of brightly painted wood in the style of its nineteenth-century predecessors, it sported a conical roof of green copper plating and slivered side windows of leaded glass. The interior glowed with a sepulchral light that only a very few highly attuned non-Ords could detect. But cats could see it easily.
Pithfwid sounded pleased as he strained once more at the leash. “Just what we need,” he told his humans. “An information booth!”
Hundreds of such general merchandise kiosks, of varying shape, size, and architectural merit, dotted the streets of the great city. Save for being possessed of (or possibly by) a shadowy radiance few but cats could see, this one looked little different from any of the others. Yet Pithfwid continued to insist it was an information booth.
Neither Simwan nor his sisters found the sight of the proprietor encouraging. The elderly woman sitting on the single high stool inside the structure wore her gray hair coiled up and back in a tight, no-nonsense bun. The thick glasses perched precariously on her vulturine beak of a nose were prevented from sliding downward by a chain of beads that ran around the back of her neck. She wore a faded, multicolor, buttoned-up sweater embroidered with alpacas and vicuñas. Looking at it, it was impossible to tell if it was a present from a well-heeled relative or a refugee from a thrift store. The sweater hung slightly open to reveal a white blouse beneath. A heavy woolen skirt completed the decidedly lackluster ensemble.
The Deavys Page 13
