Underground (Greywalker, Book 3)

by Kat Richardson

  I nodded and got out my phone to call Fish. I was still bothered by the ghost, but Quinton was right that there was nothing I could do for her. She had died a century ago and her life couldn’t be changed. I wondered what had led her to be selling herself in an alley, but had to put it out of my mind before I got angry all over again.

  Fish was just about to leave the morgue when I called. I asked him about Sistu.

  “Huh . . .” he responded. “No . . . don’t think I’ve ever heard of a sistu, but ‘zeqwa’ is a Lushootseed word that means monster— any kind of monster from a man-eating seal to an ogre or a giant dog—so whatever specific thing your source is talking about has gotta be from somewhere around Washington or British Columbia. I’ll ask my mom and my old grandma. One of them will know.”

  “Great. Thanks, Fish. Should I call you or will you call me?”

  “I’ll call, but let me give you my cell number—I’m off for a couple of days.”

  I wrote down the number he offered and disconnected.

  Quinton was watching me and pulling a chocolate doughnut to pieces. “What’s he say?”

  “He doesn’t know, but he’ll ask some people who might.”

  “All right. You want anything aside from coffee before we head out to the library?” He pointed to the part of the doughnut he hadn’t touched yet. “These things are pretty wicked.”

  I shook my head. “No thanks. I don’t like chocolate much.”

  He just raised his eyebrows and nodded. I appreciated the restraint. Some men might have made a comment about how unfeminine it was not to be gaga for chocolate, but I’d never acquired much taste for sweets—especially chocolate—between my mother’s belief that I was fat and my father’s career as a dentist. I didn’t mind skipping the doughnut, but I didn’t want to abandon my coffee before we went back out into the cold to walk to the library. It was pretty dark and we wouldn’t have a lot of time before the librarians threw us out—no matter what good friends they were with Quinton. I drank a little too fast as we headed out the doors, and yelped.

  “What? Are you hurt?” he asked, following me to the corner.

  “No,” I mumbled, throwing the cup into the trash. “I burned my tongue.”

  “Really? Let me see. Stick it out.”

  I did stick out my tongue. And made a face to go with it.

  “Oh, God, it’s horrible! A zeqwa!” he cried, throwing up his hands and cowering in mock fear.

  I pulled my tongue back in. “Nut,” I said.

  “Don’t think you can butter me up with endearments,” he replied, wagging a finger in the air. “I’ve heard that one before. Just before the guys with the straitjackets showed up.”

  We both broke up, stumbling a little on the icy sidewalk as we ascended the hill. We must have seemed drunk, giggling like children with me favoring my aching knee so I skipped and staggered unevenly, but we got to the library about an hour before closing time.

  ELEVEN

  Quinton knew his way around the library better than anyone other than an employee—and possibly better than some of them. I wasn’t entirely thrilled with the Koolhaas building but I didn’t think it an eyesore. No, the eyesore was the screaming-yellow escalator enclosure with its strange display of two faces and a giant eyeball projected on mostly spherical blobs that were seen through rough holes in the escalator’s interior wall. Shafts of light seemed to transfix the misshapen faces and eye, making them look like alien trophies as they writhed, mouthing silent words and blinking with disembodied lids. I couldn’t look at it for long. The wiggling, flickering faces reminded me too much of things out of my earliest Grey nightmares.

  Quinton caught me turning away. “Disconcerting.”

  “That’s a word for it.”

  He smiled and we came out of the escalator tunnel into the “mixing chamber”—a huge room that took up the whole floor with clusters of worktables, chairs, standing carrels, shelves, and counters where patrons and librarians were supposed to “mix” to find information. Mostly people seemed to gather in clumps and chatter among themselves, so the room had a constant low din like a tropical jungle. Quinton sought out one of the librarians who was wearing a wireless mic headset like a stagehand in a large, professional theater. After a moment’s conversation the librarian shook his head.

  “Sorry, can’t put you on the staff computer right now. Leslie’s got it. The regular computers are open and they’re pretty fast. Here, let me grab you one.”

  He darted across the chamber to a computer in a standing carrel. I thought it was a good thing we wouldn’t be using it very long, since the stand-up desk height was well designed to discourage lingering. In spite of the proximity to closing time, most of the computers in the room—and there were a lot—were in use. Many of the patrons looked high school or college age, and I guessed from the fevered looks on some of their faces that they were racing to find materials for papers due the next day. A lot of the library branches weren’t open on Sundays, so this was the natural place to come if you were running late and didn’t have Internet access at home. I wondered how many papers were being plagiarized outright in the last-minute panic.

  Quinton ran a quick search and we made a list of newspaper archive dates and issues, which I carried back to the librarian with the headset. He called to someone using the device, and a stack of bound journals and microfiche cards was delivered to me in a few minutes. I put them on a table near Quinton and went to look at his progress before I dove into them.

  He was glaring at a page full of prompts and code strings on the computer screen and typing with angry slashing strokes.

  I put a hand on his shoulder. “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  He turned his eyes up to look at me. “I wanted to check some other sources—in case there’s been anything like this elsewhere.” He looked back to the screen and frowned. “This archive is being coy—it wants a bunch of login passwords it never asked for before. Someone thinks they’re being secure but it’s just a pain in the butt. I’ll back-door it. . . .” He patted my hand and drew his away to return to the keyboard.

  “OK. I’ve got a pile of stuff from the newspaper archive. Have you found any information about the Sistu yet?”

  “Not yet . . . I’ll finish this and get to the folklore section. . . .” His concentration was on the screen and the task of getting around the system’s security. He didn’t see me nod, didn’t notice the withdrawal of my hand, so focused was his attention. I couldn’t begrudge that—I was the same way on a case sometimes. But I wondered what archive he was getting into that fascinated him so, since I couldn’t imagine anything in the library that would have that sort of security—or anything we were looking for that would need it. Quinton intrigued me, but it wasn’t for his transparency or simple life.

  I skimmed through the old Post-Intelligencer issues, taking notes on all the deaths or other strange occurrences that seemed to fit our pattern in the right date ranges.

  The records before the fire didn’t show anything that was a match—even a rough match. The first odd death happened in April of 1890, during the rebuilding, when the Kline and Rosenberg building on Washington between Commercial and Second collapsed during construction. One of the workmen had been buried under the falling bricks and was found dead and missing an arm and a leg once the bricks were shifted out of the hole. The missing limbs were never recovered and the collapse was blamed on piers that hadn’t been sunk deep enough into the mud and sawdust landfill that made up that part of town.

  I had to find a map of the original plat to realize that the site in question was now the northwest corner of Occidental Park— Washington Street was still the same, but at the time Oxy had been called Second Avenue and First Avenue was called Commercial Street. The same location where I’d seen the tumbledown building in the city’s memory of 1949. I wondered if it could have been the replacement Kline and Rosenberg building.

  Another project on Washington—the Brodeck and Schlesinger building bet
ween Third and Fourth—fell down a month later while its second floor was under construction. It was no wonder they’d turned the area into a park, since it seemed to be bad luck for buildings. Between the two events I spotted records of several more deaths with the same hallmarks. After the second building went down, though, the deaths had stopped. I didn’t know what had put an end to them—the reason for the collapse was again given as unstable piers—but I knew from experience that it was possible for magic to bring down a building and wondered if that was the real cause of the second building’s fall.

  As I read forward, that period of Seattle’s history was full of freakish events, from the city’s project to raise the streets—but not the sidewalks—that had resulted in the deep corridors I’d visited, to the “inadvertent suicide” of an unlucky pedestrian who fell from the streets above. There were other odd deaths, but I didn’t find another death by monster until that of a transient named Charles Olander in 1949. I assumed this was Chuck-o, and I felt pretty sure I was right when I read that his body had been found at the other end of Occidental, near the current football stadium, where some pipes had broken in the street during the quake. That would have been a block or less from the old Duncan and Sons shop with its life-size plaster horse standing on a platform over the sidewalk.

  Quinton sat down next to me, brushing a hand down my back and jarring me out of my thoughts about whatever was feeding on people beneath the streets.

  “Not much on the Sistu,” he said. “A lot of the Native American and local legend books are at the Ballard branch. And the other archives didn’t turn up anything like it outside the Seattle area for any time period, so it’s not a moving phenomenon—nor is it government related or monitored that I could discover. It’s localized.”

  “Why would the government—” I started.

  A voice came from overhead, telling us the library would be closing in five minutes. I tried my question again, but Quinton shook me off. I picked up my notes and got ready to go back out into the cold.

  Once outside he said, “The government gets into a lot of strange research, so I checked an old info source of mine to see if there was anything like this, but I didn’t get a hit. What did you get?”

  “Not as much as I’d like,” I admitted, sighing. “But there is a matching geographic area and everything happened down on the street level south of the skid road—it used to be Mill Street, but they changed the name to Yesler Way during the rebuilding.

  “The first related death was right after the fire. A couple of buildings collapsed down on Washington Street—the northern border of the bricks. There were several deaths in the area from Washington to what’s now Royal Brougham between April when the first building went down and May when the second one went. I don’t know what made the deaths stop, but it coincides with the second building’s collapse. The southernmost body was found the day the second building fell, down in a dumping ground which was in the same location as the current hotel project at Occidental and Royal Brougham. Apparently that area had been used as a dump for a while—debris from the fire was hauled there too— and that wasn’t the first or the last body ever found there.”

  “I’d bet that was the Seattle equivalent of dumping the bodies in the East River in New York,” Quinton said, starting to walk. “You can’t drop them into Elliot Bay, since they’d come back on the next high tide, or stick in the mudflats at low tide.”

  My own stride was slower than his, my knee now feeling stiff and swollen. “Yeah. Looks like a lot of stuff came back at high tide. The paper had the tide table on the front of every edition because the sewer backflushed whenever the tide came in so . . . you had to know when it was safe to flush your toilet. With that kind of tidal action, I doubt anyone dumped anything in the bay that they wanted to see the last of.”

  Quinton paused and matched his pace to mine. “Hell, no. What if Uncle Peter suddenly came back from his fatal fishing trip to embarrass everyone with a suspicious bullet wound or something?”

  I smiled. “What if, indeed? But don’t you think it’s funny: they raised the streets for toilets? I wonder if it still gets wet down on the old street level at high tide. . . .”

  “I can attest it does not. The seawall keeps Elliot Bay at bay. For the most part. There are seeps of course but the buildings have pumps and drains in the basements.”

  “Another undergrounder secret?”

  “Nope. A Seattle utilities problem. It’s a whole new definition of rising damp, considering the current downtown sidewalks are about thirty feet above the old sidewalks, so to keep the sewer lines at a good angle, the streets farther up the bluff must be about . . . seventy feet above their original levels, maybe more.”

  “Impressive engineering.”

  Quinton eyed me with a silly, self-conscious smile. “Yes, indeed.”

  I laughed and didn’t even feel guilty. “Is that flirting?”

  “That’s what it said on the instructions. Did I do it badly?”

  “No, but don’t let it get out of hand,” I warned with a lack of sincerity.

  “No, ma’am,” he replied, smothering a chuckle. He made his face serious. “All right, all right. Back to work. So we know the area is the same for all the significant deaths and that whatever is causing them comes and goes.”

  “I think our monster’s trapped down there,” I said.

  “It seems to get around if it wants to,” Quinton replied.

  “Only up to a point. It doesn’t wander far from the core of the bricks and never has so long as white men have been keeping records. We don’t know that it’s this Sistu, but it’s the only monster anyone’s come up with and it’s of native origin and, as you said, the phenomenon is localized to Seattle’s tenderloin. It seems to turn up when things get torn apart in the historic district, which used to be the mudflats—Indian fishing grounds. We don’t know when or how it was last put to bed, but it does seem to have a limit or a way to box it up. This creature doesn’t just run amok forever. We don’t know enough about the history of the underground to know exactly what’s been done down there or when that might have unleashed and later banished this thing.”

  “We need to take the tour.”

  “What?”

  “The Underground Tour. I think they’ve got one late tour left today, if we hurry.” Quinton grabbed my elbow to support me and began to jog down the snow-crusted street toward Pioneer Square. “Can you run? C ’mon. The historian may know something if we catch him.”

  “The Underground Tour? It’s a tourist trap,” I objected, skittering and wincing along behind him.

  “Yeah,” he agreed, “but it’s about real history. They spin it for the guests, but the facts are still the same. If anyone knows anything about the history of the underground and the strange things that happened in it, it’ll be the tour people.”

  We slid and slipped down the hill to the Square and made it in at the back of the last tour of the day. We’d missed the introductory speech, but since the group was small, and the weather lousy, the woman at the ticket window let us join the group as they headed out to the totem pole. Our guide was a tall, lanky man in his fifties with one lazy eye and hair that had faded from red to gingery beige. His voice was clear and loud without being a shout and his patter was funny enough to distract the small group from stamping their chilling feet too much.

  “I know it’s pretty cold out here so I’m going to keep this part short and get us in under the street in just a minute. A lot of the area we’re going to be walking through is condemned and of course it’s all private property, so you’ll want to stay close to me and not wander off. It’s perfectly safe so long as you stay on the wooden walkways and cleared paths—our rats are all union here and they don’t like to cross any lines, but they do occasionally pick off stragglers, so your best bet is to stay with the group and . . . are there any children here . . . ? No? Oh, well . . . usually we call ’em bait, but you adults will have to take your chances.”

  Tha
t got a laugh.