Underground

by Kat Richardson

  He gave me a curious frown. “What are you doing?”

  “Remember I said I can see layers of time?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Some places they’re slanted up, like broken bits of riverbed— layers and layers of time—and they’re easier to get at. They’re physically displaced, though, so I may not be able to go very far before I run into an obstacle or the bit of time just breaks off.”

  He shook his head like a dog irritated by a flea. “You’re implying you can time travel. . . .”

  “No. I can wander around in a tiny piece of time associated with this location. Most of it’s just a recording—a kind of persistent memory—of this place. If I’m lucky, I’ll find a ghost who’s awake enough to talk to me, but most won’t even know I’m there. What I need you to do is keep an eye on me and the area so I don’t freak someone out or end up banging into something out here. I don’t know what happens at this end and I wasn’t worrying about it too much the last time I had to do this, but I can’t see this bit of time well while I’m in the other one.”

  Quinton narrowed his eyes. “OK . . . But what if I can’t see you?”

  “Let’s find out,” I said, pushing one of the planes of time and sliding onto it.

  I slipped sideways into another version of the alley. There were two young men in cloth caps and knee-length trousers who paid me no attention as they sprinted along, darting in and out of doorways and yelling to the proprietors something I couldn’t quite hear. I followed one of them a few feet before I heard a sharp whistle blast behind me.

  I whirled and was caught in a flood of policemen who poured into the doorways just as a lot of civilians tried to surge out of those same openings. The noise was deafening and the two groups clashed, yelling. But none noticed me.

  I slid back out of the fragment of time and found myself closer to the opposite end of the alley than when I’d started. Quinton was a few steps away, wide-eyed.

  “What happened?” I asked. “Are we all right?”

  “Yeah, but you were pretty hard to see. If I hadn’t known to look for you, I might have dismissed you as a shadow in this light. Where did you go?”

  “When. Looked like sometime during Prohibition. Not the period I need. We may have to go down below.”

  “There’s not much access on this block. Some places, the underground’s been cut off or is in use. This is one of those bits. What else can you find up here?”

  “Not sure. Let me look around a bit more.”

  I reached for the fluttering edges of time and eased into them, pushing and shoving, looking for an indication I’d found the right time period. No luck in that alley. We moved on to another and I tried again.

  I found a slab of 1949 that smelled of dust and dry red dirt, and I stepped into a street still littered with debris from the earthquake. The silvery shape of the hotel across from my office had rained ghost bricks onto the sidewalk and a handful of workmen’s shadows were shoving them into piles with what looked like bristleless push brooms. A lighted sign from another business lay where it had crashed from its moorings. I started forward, feeling a sort of push against my body as if I was walking against the current of a river. Time was intractable there and I knew it would resist any efforts by me to do anything.

  I walked past the workmen, who didn’t acknowledge me, and looked around. The street was busy enough with the memories of people cleaning up, but I doubted any of them would be much help even if they could see me. I went on toward Occidental, looking for the ghost of one of the street people who might be more aware of me than the shades of solid citizens. A building stood where most of Occidental Park was in my time—rather it slumped there, decrepit and broken backed, clearly destined for demolition. I stopped, startled to see the old place.

  A ghostly dog ran to me and barked, putting its front paws out and its rump up, tail wagging. A cloud of birds erupted from the shattered roof of the building. One of the workmen called to the dog and finally came to drag it away from me by the collar, but he never saw me at all, berating the dog for its strange behavior as they moved away.

  Seeing a phantom man in shabby clothes at the end of the block, I walked across the littered street and down the sidewalk toward him. He also didn’t see me, but I followed him a while, growing a little more tired with every step against the inflexibility of time. He stopped to talk to three other rough-clad male ghosts at the corner where Waterfall Garden Park would stand someday. One of the men lifted his head to look at me, though his gaze was a bit unfocused.

  I walked close to him.

  “Hi,” I tried.

  He hadn’t been that old, but he had the worn and weary demeanor of the prematurely aged. He nodded to me and said, “Ma’am.” His fellows ignored him as they carried on their memory of a conversation.

  I wasn’t quite sure how this would work. I’d never tried questioning a ghost in his own environment before. Would he be aware that he wasn’t alive? That things had happened after this moment in which we stood?

  “I’m trying to find out if anyone’s been hurt down here.”

  “Here? In the skid?”

  I nodded. “Yes. After the earthquake but not by the earthquake. ”

  “Y ’mean Chuck-o.”

  “Was he hurt?”

  “Killed.”

  “What killed him?”

  “Something chewed him up and spit him back.” The ghost pointed to the southwest. “Down by the cowboy store. This morning . . . or when it was.” He looked confused. “When it was. When was it? Not sure . . .”

  “How long ago was the earthquake?” I asked. He seemed to be aware of time as more than one point simultaneously, but not too good at dealing with it.

  He looked happier with a simple question. “Quake was two days ago. And Chuck was found today.”

  “All right,” I said. “Do you know now or will you know what killed him?”

  His face pinched in thought for a minute. Then he replied, “No. But not something human. Not a dog, either. Or falling bricks.”

  “How are you sure of that?”

  He snorted. “How do you know water is wet? I just know.”

  I nodded, feeling drained. “Thanks.”

  He returned my nod and fell back into his conversation as if I wasn’t there.

  I walked back to a less conspicuous location—I hoped—and slipped back out of the fragment of time. I emerged in a different alley and saw Quinton nearby, watching me.

  “It’s hard to keep up with you in there,” he said.

  “Really? It seems like I’m struggling to move an inch at time. I would have thought I’d be easy to follow.”

  “You don’t move fast, but you move through the edges of things and it’s hard to see you. Sometimes you disappeared into walls, but you’d show up again in a second or two.”

  “Hm . . .” I mumbled, thinking. I’d had some earlier clues that I got a bit incorporeal on this side of the Grey, but I wasn’t sure how much. I was too tired to muck around with the idea, though.

  “Did you find anything?” Quinton asked.

  “Huh?” I shook myself back to attention. “Not a lot. A tramp in 1949 who said a man named Chuck was killed near the old Duncan and Sons—the cowboy store, he called it. Sounded like the same cause, but he didn’t know anything. And I saw the building that used to stand where Oxy Park is. I don’t know why it seemed odd to see it. . . .”

  It was getting later and I felt I’d discovered nothing new about the immediate problem.

  “We should get going. There’s nothing else accessible here.”

  It was already getting dark under the snowy clouds, so we stopped for lunch—I was ravenous from my exertions in the layers of time—and finished up our exploration of the ground level. Then we descended into the tunnels beneath the sidewalks and alleys in the bricks, and I slid and slipped in and out of fractured time.

  The area under Occidental Avenue was thick with memories and with the spectral flames of the fire
, but most of the shades I saw there were mere recordings with no ability to answer me. We went up and down the blocks under the street until one ghost caught my eye. I tried to get a better look, but she darted down the alley gallery into which Quinton and I had first dropped with Blue Jay. It felt like weeks ago.

  Here, the layers of time were less disarrayed, and I thought I could stay within the current confines of the alley if I pursued the ghost into her own plane of time.

  “Keep an eye on me,” I ordered Quinton as I riffled the edges of time, looking for a glimpse of the face I’d spotted.

  “Got your back,” he said as I pushed into the bright shock of ghostly summer and slid into the silver fragment of time.

  The place wasn’t empty in the cold sunshine of a long-past summer evening. A thin crowd of incorporeal men walked along the mud-floored alley that even in the memory of heat and dry weather stank of waste and spilled alcohol and a sea-salt odor of something that had died in the mud long ago. The men wore the rough working clothes of lumberjacks and miners, and they peered into odd little lean-tos built against the backs of the new brick and stone buildings that soared out of the pit of the half-built sidewalks. A few thin girl ghosts sat beside the blanket-covered doorways of the shacks at the bottom of the buildings.

  The combination of the masonry buildings and the pit made me think I had to be in a time after the fire but before they covered the sidewalks, so I must have been in the reconstruction— about when the deaths had first started. I knew they’d raised the street level to accommodate modern plumbing and get the roads above the high-tide mark, and I’d seen the original first floors of the buildings near Quinton’s bunker, but it hadn’t occurred to me until I was standing in it that the sidewalks and alleys had lain below the street for a while, forming canyons around every block until whenever the new sidewalks had been built to connect the new street level to . . . I glanced up and saw fancy doorways complete with lintels and footings just hanging from the sides of the buildings one floor above me, waiting for the sidewalks to come to them like sand washed seasonally onto a rocky beach.

  This alley deep in the lava beds had become a row of cribs— cheap bunks for the lowest class of prostitutes to turn their trade in. Men too poor, too vicious, or too low-down to go to one of the many famed and infamous brothels of Seattle trawled this sunken, ghastly place for the most pitiful and desperate women, hidden from disapproving middle-class eyes by the sheer walls of the rising roads and stone buildings. I felt a little sickened. If one of the ghostly girls had any free will, then I’d found a possible witness right at the source. I’d have to talk to her—I couldn’t back away from the job because I found the setting distasteful—but I did wish I didn’t have to know this place.

  One of the men stopped to bargain with one of the girls—a tiny Asian who looked about sixteen. The girl didn’t seem frightened of the bigger white man in his rough clothes, just tired, and she nodded to him and they went into the lean-to behind them. I felt a flush of anger and disgust and had to remind myself that this was the past and there was nothing I could do to change it.

  I’d noticed that the ghosts who could interact usually wanted to—almost seemed compelled to, as if the opportunity to break their endless routine of memory was like a flame to a proverbial moth. They had come to me in the recent past for help; now I’d come to them. I didn’t like manipulating them, but I would do what I had to to get the information I needed.

  I looked around and saw one of the young prostitutes flinch, startled at seeing me. She was the girl I’d spotted earlier, I was sure. I darted down the alley to the crib the girl was edging into and stopped a few feet in front of her, trying to catch her eye.

  “Don’t go. I won’t hurt you, I just want to talk to you.”

  The girl shook her head, twin black braids flying outward, and stepped backward farther. She was wearing a thin, ragged calico dress that brushed over her bare feet. I looked harder at her. She was Native American and I was a strange-looking towering white woman in an alley full of ethnic child prostitutes. I shouldn’t have been surprised she was intimidated.

  I squatted down, smothering a wince, in the stinking memory of the unfinished alleyway, bringing my head down below hers. I was appalled at how young she looked—twelve, maybe? None of the men or other girls in the alley took notice of me—one of the men stepped right through me, raising a hard shiver on my back.

  The girl backed up to the edge of the entry flap. “No, spirit, go. I should not talk to you.”

  I put out my hands, palms up, resting on my knees, so she could see I didn’t have anything in them to hide. “I need your help.”

  She made a face. “What help?” she spat. She feared I was trying to trick her—I’d seen that in the living often enough.

  “I’m trying to find . . . a creature. A monster that shouldn’t be here. I want to make it go away. It hurts people—kills them. It killed people here, now.”

  The girl jerked back a little farther. “A zeqwa?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know. It’s a monster.”

  “A monster,” the girl said, nodding and shuffling a little closer. Her English was accented and clumsy. “A zeqwa.” She shook her head with exasperated pity and squatted down in front of me. “Foolish spirit, you. Many zeqwa. Some eat children.” All right, so a monster was a zeqwa and there were a lot of different kinds. Which one was I looking for?

  “Some do,” I agreed. “This one eats anyone it can find. It can chew through rocks and it catches people and it eats some of them and some it . . . makes walk after death. Do you know about it?”

  She shook her head. “Not eating or making the walker. But I see Sistu in the water and on the land. I see him in the . . .” She waved her hand to indicate the depth of the alley and the enclosing buildings. “In this place.”

  “What is Sistu? What kind of zeqwa?” I asked, knowing I was frowning with interest and the growing throb in my bent knee and hoping I wasn’t frightening her.

  “Monster. A . . .” She made a motion with both hands that I couldn’t quite understand. Seeing my confusion, she stuck a finger in the mud and made a long, sinuous line and hissed.

  “A snake,” I said.

  “Bigger than snake!” she snapped. “Big as you stand.”

  “A serpent . . . a sea serpent?”

  “Yes! But he comes on the land, too. Three heads. One like a snake on each end, one like a man in the middle. Many, many teeth. Very hungry, very strong. His blood can turn you to stone. His stare make you freeze. I see Sistu in the dark here below.”

  “Where did he come from? Where does he live?”

  The girl shook her head. “He lives in the pool. He come from the water.” Then she looked over my shoulder and I felt the presence of a ghost nearly on top of me.

  I stood, turning and stepping aside as the ghost of a man in work clothes stopped where I’d been crouching. He held out his hand, the phantom sun sending a spark from the coins in it.

  The girl ghost stood up and took the coins, looking at them suspiciously. Then, smiling mechanically, she let the man follow her into the crib. As the curtain over the doorway fell, I saw her expression became unseeing and blank as the fragment of time curled on itself in the repetition of her endless loop of memory.

  I backed away before I reached out, grabbing for the edges of the temporacline, and slid out of the slice of history, gritting my teeth against impotent fury, frustration, and the grinding ache of old injuries.

  I stumbled back into the haunted corridor beneath the street and bumped into Quinton. I could feel the tension in my jaw as I brushed past him. “Get me out of here.”

  “What happened?” he asked, catching up to me in a few strides and then passing me to lead the way out.

  “I found the ghost of a child prostitute—Indian. She said she saw a zeqwa—a monster—called Sistu about the time of the first deaths.”

  “Is it the one we’re looking for?”

  “I don�
��t know. The timing’s right, but she said it’s a sea serpent of some kind with three heads.”

  “And you don’t think a three-headed sea serpent is very likely to have done this?”

  I felt myself growling and stopped to take a deep breath—or three—and calm down. “I don’t know. Her description doesn’t make sense to me. She must have been twelve! A kid!”

  He put his hands on my shoulders. “Shh . . . Harper. She was a kid, but you can’t do anything about that. Not now. Let’s find out about this monster. Then we’ll have something more to go on. Now, be stealthy or someone may catch us coming up from here.”

  I stifled myself and limped after Quinton.

  I’d managed to avoid any dire filth this time, so we got a table in Zeitgeist Coffee. We cleaned up and sat down to figure out what to do next.

  “I think we need to look at the newspaper archives at the library, ” Quinton suggested. “The central branch will be open for a few more hours today, and we might be able to find out more now that we have the info from the morgue.”

  “I need to call Fish and find out what he knows about this Sistu thing. Maybe it’s got some signature or habit or something we can look for.”

  “And we can look it up and see if there’s more information. If it’s a local legend, there may be documents in the local folklore and Native American sections.”

  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.”