Bone

by George C. Chesbro

  "Cats," Zulu said as three white-furred creatures flashed through the cone of light. "They're mutants. Around the turn of the century, when they were building these lines, the workers brought down cats in an attempt to get rid of the rats. Obviously, the rats survived—and now there are thousands of these mutant cats down here. They live all their lives in the darkness. Every once in a while a humane society will send members down and trap a few to adopt out, but the few they catch don't begin to make a dent in the cat population."

  "You seem to know a lot about what goes on down here, Zulu."

  "I used to be what's called a 'track walker' for the MTA. In the fifteen years I spent with them, I must have walked a couple of thousand miles down here. It was my job to walk the tracks looking for gas, water or sewage leaks, and pick up trash. Also, the friction between the wheels and the rails -creates a kind of dust that sticks to the steel, and that has to be constantly scraped away; if it isn't, you get track fires and short circuits. Would you believe that track walkers collect up to fifteen hundred fifty-pound bags of trash every twenty-four hours?"

  "How did you end up on the streets, Zulu?"

  Zulu's response was a laugh that Bone thought contained more than a trace of bitterness. "You think of me as one of the homeless, don't you, Bone-man?"

  "I'm sorry, Zulu. It was a very personal question, and it's none of my business. Actually, I meant the question as a compliment. You seem to be a man of many talents who certainly doesn't need to be living under Grand Central Terminal."

  They walked in silence for some time, until they finally came to the junction of the Penn Central and Conrail tracks, which ran east and west. Bone, who was certain he had offended the man who had twice saved his life, did not speak for fear of making matters worse.

  Finally, Zulu said: "Bone-man, how many people do you know who can make a living doing exactly what they want to do—doing what they'd do anyway, for nothing, if they couldn't get paid for it?" If Zulu had been offended, there was no trace of it in his voice now.

  Now it was Bone's turn to laugh. "Zulu, you're talking to a man who doesn't know who he knows."

  "Right."

  "But I suspect that I don't know many."

  "Right again, Bone-man," Zulu said, and grunted with satisfaction. "Well, you're talking to one of those few. I always wanted to be a writer. Do you know how many writers there are in this country—published authors—who can make a living at it? Damn few. Anyway, there I was with a job I hated and a dream of being a writer. I'd been writing ever since I was a kid, and I kept writing through the years—early mornings and evenings, before and after work. I'd walk these tracks, and the ideas would just keep tumbling over and over in my head. But I couldn't make them come out right on paper. I never got a single thing that I wrote published. Then I realized that I was a different kind of writer—I write things in my head, on the spot, and that's how I publish them; I publish my stories in sound, just as they come to me, on the spot. And I found I was damn good at it. One day I just decided that that was what I damn well wanted to do, all I wanted to do, and I've been doing it ever since. I've been supporting myself with my writing for better than seven years now. I guess some people would call me a performance artist. As you saw, I kept my keys from the time I worked for the subway. In the beginning, after I started writing full-time, I just kind of hung out down here when things were tough. Then things got better, I started to get regulars coming to hear me and I started to make money. But I'd gotten used to living down here. It's a place to sleep, I have everything I need and, like I said earlier, the rent is exactly right. I'm doing exactly what I want to do, and I'm satisfied with my work and life. I tell stories on the street because I want to, and I live under Grand Central because that's where I want to live."

  "It's called success," Bone said, and then abruptly stopped walking.

  Zulu stopped, turned and put a hand gently on Bone's shoulder. "What's the matter, Bone-man? You look funny. You all right?"

  "Success is making a living doing what you want to do," Bone said distantly.

  "Yeah," Zulu replied, and frowned. "So what?"

  Bone lifted his left hand into the beam of light, studied the scar tissue and calluses there, the bent fingers. "I think I am—or was—successful in the same sense, Zulu."

  "You remember something, Bone-man?"

  Bone shook his head. "It's just a feeling I got when you were talking about doing what you do, and living where you live, by choice. Suddenly I got the feeling . . . that I'd been like that. I think that's how I made a living—doing what I wanted to do."

  "Mountain climbing?"

  Bone brought his other hand up into the light, turned it over, slowly nodded.

  "Then what are we doing down here, Bone-man? A tunnel is not a mountain."

  Bone thought—about his dreams, the panic attack in the underpass, his sense of familiarity with the darkness. "In a certain sense, it is," he said at last. "From the way you describe it to me, all of this intricate network of tunnels, on many levels, is like a huge, inverted mountain beneath the city."

  Zulu shrugged. "I never thought of it that way. I guess you're right."

  "I feel I have to climb to help myself remember; climbing may be the key to memory. But I also feel that whatever happened to cause me to lose my memory, and that the connection between me and the killings and the murderer . . . it happened to me here, underground. You found me after I'd somehow managed to come up to the surface."

  "I hear you, Bone-man," Zulu said with quiet intensity.

  Bone thought about it some more, then realized that he was pressing too hard. He let it go, turned and looked up into the chiseled features of the other man. "Are you African, Zulu?"

  Zulu laughed. "Harlem—East Hundred and Sixteenth Street. My nom de plume is part of the performance. My real name is Horace Thorogood—and I'd just as soon you kept that to yourself."

  "It's forgotten, Zulu."

  They walked for another five minutes, and then Zulu reached out and gripped Bone's shoulder, at the same time sweeping the area with the flashlight. "As close as I can figure it,

  Bone-man, I'd say we're just about under the area where I found you on the sidewalk."

  Bone took a few steps forward, then stopped and looked all around him—but there was nothing to see but the tracks and walls of the subway tunnel stretching back and forth into the darkness beyond the beam of light. It looked no different from any of the other tunnels, and he felt no particular sense of familiarity. He could not understand what he would have been doing here—or how he could have climbed through solid rock to the surface.

  "I think we wasted our time," Bone said with a sigh.

  "There sure doesn't seem to be much here—and it looks about the same for a half mile or so in either direction. I know."

  "There's no access route to the surface?"

  "Not in this area."

  "What's between us and the surface?"

  "It's hard to tell," Zulu replied, pursing his lips. "Probably phone lines and power cables packed together tight as cooked spaghetti."

  "What about below?"

  "God and maybe a couple of dead engineers only know, Bone-man. I just know the subway system. But there are probably sewer and water mains, all sorts of things. Some of those pipes are big enough to drive a truck through. Even if you were in one of those, what would you have been doing there? And how could you have gotten out?"

  Bone shook his head. He felt he was slowly finding pieces to the puzzle, and yet the identity of the stranger remained as elusive as ever. "You're sure we're under the spot where you found me."

  "In the general area, yes. You were on the sidewalk, next to a construction project."

  "The femur is another key," Bone said almost to himself.

  "You sure as hell weren't about to let go of that thing."

  "I had to hold on to it because it was important; it provided the answer to the question of where I had been, and what had happened to me." />
  "Maybe the construction people accidentally uncovered some old graveyard when they were digging down for the foundation."

  "What was on that site before they put up the new building?"

  "A parking lot—and before that, a grocery store."

  Bone again shook his head. "I didn't find the femur at the construction site; I'm sure of it."

  "How can you be so sure of that?"

  "I've been having recurring dreams, Zulu. There's darkness, torchlight—and the bones are jutting right out of the floor, walls and ceiling of what seems to be a cave; it's definitely not a subway tunnel. Then there's a figure dressed all in orange . . . and streaked with blood."

  "Maybe it's something you ate, Bone-man."

  Bone smiled thinly. "I need to find a way to get further down."

  "There may not be anything below us but dirt and granite, Bone-man—and even if there is something else down there, I sure as hell don't know how you're going to get to it. There are probably access routes to the sewage and water mains, but I don't know anything about them. If I did, I wouldn't want to go down there. I don't know anybody who knows a lot about everything that's under Manhattan."

  But he knew somebody who did, Bone thought as he turned with Zulu and started to walk back the way they had come. But he didn't know how to contact Barry Prindle—and probably -couldn't get the man's cooperation if he could contact him. There seemed nothing else to do but wait for the wound in his stomach to heal. If he could not go down below the ground any further, then his only hope was to go up, toward the sky, and hope that he would finally meet and know the stranger there. And hope that searching for the answer wouldn't cost him his life.

  Chapter Fifteen

  (i)

  Softly humming a hymn to himself, Barry Prindle—wearing a new black oilcloth raincoat with matching hat—turned left off Broadway, onto Fifty-seventh Street. Walking quickly, keeping to the shadows cast by the building, he went halfway down the block, then turned into a narrow alleyway. Three quarters of the way down the alley he set down the plastic garbage bag he was carrying, reached down and into a niche in the brick wall of the building on his right, came out with a crowbar. Then he got down on his knees and brushed away the dirt and refuse concealing an ancient manhole cover, chipped and rusted around the edges. Just barely visible in the worn metal was the date, 1917. Prindle slipped the end of the crowbar into the notch in the cover, pried up the heavy steel and slid it to one side. He paused to wipe sweat away from beneath his pronounced widow's peak, then clambered into the hole, pausing on the third bent, iron rung to reach back and haul the cover back over his head. Then he climbed the long distance to the bottom and stepped into a spacious concrete chamber which housed the old, broken valve system for a part of the Croton water system—New York City's first successful attempt to tap bountiful upstate waters to sate the thirst of its population and flush its wastes. He drew a flashlight out of a pocket of his raincoat, turned it on.

  The joints on one of the steel panels covering one wall of the room were rusted away. Prindle pushed his shoulder against one side of the panel, and it gave way. He stepped through the narrow opening into the interior of a dry water pipe more than seven feet in diameter. He moved to his left, walked a hundred yards to where sections of the pipe had separated to allow dirt to trickle in over the years, finally piling up to the height of a man's waist. Prindle tossed his garbage bag through the space between the pipes, then climbed up the dirt pile and squeezed through the opening, sliding down the sheer rock wall on the other side onto the smooth, cold stone of an ancient underground riverbed. He propped the flashlight on a rock, aiming it toward the ceiling so that the light would reflect off the limestone roof of the cavern, which was perhaps eight feet high. He flicked flakes of dried blood off his black slicker, then opened the garbage bag to once again examine the three heads inside.

  They were the heads of two old women and a young man: Trixie Fein, Elma Dockowicz and Richard Green—two schizophrenics and a homeless teenager whose brain had been irreparably damaged by PCP. Time after time, Prindle thought, he and Anne had tried to help these people. With Ali Hakim's help, they had put these people away into safe places; but they had not stayed there, as they should have. These three people had returned to the streets to suffer needlessly. But now he had taken care of their problem, sent them on to the same God who had played such nasty tricks on him. He was still God's messenger, the arbiter of who had suffered enough and deserved to be relieved of further misery.

  The thought gave him an erection. He'd always had erections, some of them painful, after executions; but he had always ignored them as best he could, realizing that the sexual excitement was a burden he had to bear. He'd been taught that it was forbidden to relieve himself, and he'd had to remain pure for Anne. But now things had changed; God had shown him that he didn't have to play fair. Now nothing was forbidden, at least not to him. Anne would still be his, one way or another.

  He unzipped his pants, took out his stiff penis and began to furiously masturbate as he gazed down at the three severed heads. Within moments he ejaculated. Trembling with pleasure, Prindle zipped his pants back up, picked up the plastic bag and headed down the dry riverbed toward his cathedral.

  He certainly felt very strange, Prindle thought as he moved along the water-scoured stone. He had believed that Ali Hakim would be his last gift to God; Bone would be caught and sentenced for the killings, and he would at last be free of his terrible burden of responsibility—and consequently free of his terrors. Without the burden of Bone, he would be free to pursue and marry Anne. He was certain it would have worked if Bone had been caught. Even with Bone free, he'd been certain that Anne's attitude toward him would change. Yet, when he had asked her to have dinner with him that evening, she had once again refused. Worse, he had detected something in her voice that had enraged him. She was, Anne had told him, feeling regret that she had been so quick to condemn Bone; she'd shared with him Bone's conviction that the killings were somehow connected to him, and Anne had gone on to ask ii he, Barry, didn't think it possible that the real killer had murdered Ali in an attempt to frame Bone. The more she thought about it, Anne had said, the more she could not understand how, or why, Bone would have killed Ali. She'd said that she desperately wanted to talk to Bone.

  Talk to Bone indeed, Prindle thought. He had never imagined it possible that Bone would manage to escape from the office building, and he could not understand why the police had not found him yet. He had never imagined that Anne would ever again consider the possibility that Bone could still be innocent. It made no sense.

  Things were all falling apart for him once again, Prindle thought. His response had been to go out and search for more of the city's wretched to send on to God; after all, as long as Bone was free the police would assume that it was Bone doing the executions. He recalled the surge of excitement he had experienced when he had realized that Bone's release meant that he was free to continue with his mission. He enjoyed his work. He enjoyed the power. His work was not better than sex; it had become the same as sex. And it was not as if he were doing something wrong; he was carrying out God's mission. Except for the time when Mary Kellogg had come upon him right after he had sent one of her fellow wretches on to God, he had never before killed more than one person in a night. Now he wondered why he had been so reticent; there were certainly enough wretched people in the city who deserved to be put out of their misery, and he knew exactly who they were, and he usually knew where to find them. He had been wrong to limit himself. He decided that he would kill a minimum of four the next night. The number meant nothing as long as he did what God required, which was to give them—or at least their heads—a decent burial, and he had always done this.

  Suddenly the riverbed widened, and the ceiling of the ancient subterranean waterway became higher. Prindle came to the first of the Coleman lamps he had hung on nails driven into cracks in the rock walls. He checked the level of kerosene in the lamp, then lit it
with a match. The lamp flared, and he adjusted the flame to its highest level. He walked around the perimeter of the circular, domed stone chamber, taking care to avoid the quicksand pit in the center, and lit three other Coleman lamps, one at each point of the compass. Then he squatted down in front of the flat stone that was his altar and looked out over his cathedral with its two crypts—one very old, and one he had begun and consecrated. A year ago.

  Here, in the great chamber deep below Manhattan's West Side, the bedrock granite had given way to more porous limestone, as well as veins and pockets of soil. To his right, ancient, ossified bones from some aboriginal graveyard jutted at odd angles out of a large lode of moist earth that had, over the centuries, sunk down to this level; bones lay scattered on the rock floor, occasionally having been shaken free from the soil by subterranean tremors. Light from the Coleman lamps flickered eerily, reflecting off the tangle of bones and the slick, dark surface of the large quicksand pit in the center of the chamber. The pit was his burial ground, Prindle thought; this was where he buried the heads of all his victims.

  It was at the opposite end of his cathedral, at the narrow mouth of one of three smaller channels, that the man known only as Bone had suddenly, inexplicably, appeared out of nowhere.

  Prindle still remembered the thrill he had experienced when, while doing some mapping of the Croton water system for one of Empire Subway's clients, he had discovered this uncharted, serpentine river channel and the great crypt-cathedral that was its heart. He had instantly recognized it for what it was—a gift from God, a sign, the church of his own that had previously been denied him. He'd been certain that God had guided him to this, his own, cathedral for a purpose—and he had soon discovered that purpose, which was when he had left Empire Subway and gone to work for the city's Human Resources Administration.