Underground

by Kat Richardson

  “Damn it,” Quinton muttered. Then Tall Grass gulped, fainted, and slumped to the floor.

  Quinton looked down at him. “I was never glad to see someone faint before.”

  “Hey . . .”

  We both looked around. Someone had stuck their head around the corner. When we caught sight of it, the head pulled back.

  “Don’t run off, Lass!” Quinton hissed. He motioned with his head for me to catch Lass.

  I sprinted down the rough walkway, feeling sudden twinges in my bad knee, and collared Lass less than ten feet down the Occidental side. “C ’mon and lend a shoulder, Lass,” I suggested. “We have to get Tall Grass out of here.”

  Lassiter goggled at me, shaking. His hands crabbed for his pockets.

  “Don’t reach for that,” I told him. “I don’t go down easily and I’ll take you with me. Not going to hurt you if you come help Quinton and me out.”

  He shuffled reluctantly ahead of me to where Quinton was trying to get Tall Grass up. The Indian was unconscious and limp.

  Quinton looked hard at Lass and told him, “Put your shoulder under his armpit and get him up. We’ll have to carry him up the Cadillac stairs and hope we can find a place to leave him.”

  “Why not here?” Lass whined. “Who cares? Why are we risking our necks for him?”

  “Because if he stays down here while he’s like this, he might die. I helped you. Now you help me. Or I won’t be doing you any favors in the future, Lass. Get me?”

  “OK, OK. I got you.”

  Lass helped lift Tall Grass and the two men carried him like a sack between them to the bottom of the stairs that came up beside the Cadillac Hotel. I scouted up the stairs and peeked out, waiting until I was sure the street was empty to hiss at them to come up.

  Tall Grass was making noises and trying to move by the time we reached the street. Quinton set him on the sidewalk and hunched down beside him. I grabbed Lassiter’s wrist before he could hare off.

  While Quinton checked on Grass and muttered to him, I interrogated Lass a bit.

  “What were you doing down there?”

  “I—I live down there.”

  “Not right there . . .”

  “Not all the time, no. I—I heard something. I heard Grass talking to himself. He’s on drugs, man!”

  “Surprise, surprise. He thinks he saw a monster eat John Bear.”

  “I told you—he’s flipped out.”

  “I’m not sure he didn’t see a monster down there.”

  “What?”

  “You see monsters. I heard you say so.”

  He looked startled and glanced around but I was blocking his only line of escape.

  “Did you see the monster that ate Bear?”

  “I seen things. . . .”

  “What did you see and where did you see it?”

  “I seen—I seen a . . . lot of scary dudes. They hurt us. . . . That’s what Q-man gave me the stunner for.”

  “Yeah, but I’ll bet you’ve seen more than that, or you wouldn’t be so scared.”

  “I seen . . . a snake. Big snake.”

  I looked skeptical—not that I didn’t believe him, I just wanted to make this insecure man talk, and nothing starts some people off like the idea that others don’t believe them.

  “I did! It was as big as a car! It had a whole man in its mouth— like when a rattlesnake tries to swallow an egg.”

  “Where did you see it?”

  “Uh . . . Under the Square.”

  “You can’t get under the Square.”

  “Yeah, you can! Behind the Pioneer Building there’s a grate down in the alley. You just lift it up and go in the hole!”

  “When did you see the snake there?”

  “I can’t remember! Leave me alone!” He shoved at me and bolted past my shoulder. I could have stopped him, but he needed to salvage some pride and I didn’t mind letting him think he’d gotten away with it. I thought I knew where to find him later.

  I turned back to Quinton and Tall Grass, who was fighting his way back to his feet.

  “Get away,” Grass snapped.

  “You gonna be all right?” Quinton asked him.

  “I’m fine.”

  “You were pretty hysterical. . . .”

  He glared at Quinton and stared around. Seeing me with the hat still in one hand, he darted over and snatched it from me. “That’s Jenny’s hat.”

  “You said it was Bear’s hat.”

  Tall Grass looked trapped, his eyes shifting restlessly between us. “It’s not.”

  “C ’mon, Grass,” Quinton went on. “We all know it was Bear’s hat. You said you saw him get eaten by a monster.”

  “I didn’t say that!”

  “Yes, you did. We want to stop it. We want to find the thing that ate Jenny.”

  “I didn’t see the S-s—... I didn’t see it eat her!” Grass wailed. He leaned against the nearest wall and buried his face in the cap in his hands. “We were sleeping and it came in the dark. Like rushing water. And she made a noise and then . . . then I felt something cold and it smelled rotten and stinking. I opened my eyes and saw it swimming away through the walls. It swam through rock! All I had left was this stupid, stupid hat! And tonight I saw John Bear. Bear’s ghost. Walking through the bricks and he stopped and looked at me and said, ‘You keep the hat.’ Then he left. He left me with this hat. He cursed me with it.” Even with his voice muffled by the fur of the hat, I could hear him sobbing, and his shoulders shook with the spasms.

  “It’s not the hat, Grass. Believe me, that’s not what got either of them killed,” Quinton said. “Bear wouldn’t curse anyone. He just wanted to make sure his things went to the right people. You know how Bear was.”

  Tall Grass shivered and raised his head. He didn’t look at us, but he spoke to us nonetheless, stuttering as he caught his breath. “The z-zeqwa . . . took her. S-s—”

  “We know what it was. We want to find it and find out why it came.”

  “I don’t know,” Grass whispered fiercely. “If someone sent it to eat Jenny, I’ll tear his head off!”

  “We’ll find out. You go find a fire to sleep near tonight. Don’t sleep in the bricks. Don’t sleep in the skid at all. Hear me?”

  Tall Grass nodded mutely, still dazed at his own outburst of grief and anger. We walked him up to Occidental Park and left him with a scowling Sandy while we went on to try to find the grate that led under Pioneer Square.

  “Why would he say that?” I asked. “That someone sent it?”

  Quinton shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe he believes it came hunting her.”

  I frowned and let that tumble in my head.

  We discovered a grille loose in the alley floor between the Seattle Mystery Bookshop and the back of the Pioneer block. A steel frame and hinge marked where it had been embedded at one time, but now had been twisted out of its frame and laid back on top of the hole. To my eyes, the whole area was clogged with cold silver mist, the grating outlined and blazing in neon red and yellow—not the most comfortable combination.

  Quinton glanced around as if making a mental note of the place. “I never knew there was anything under this.”

  “Me, either.” I bent and pulled on the grille. It swung up and revealed a narrow vault, barely one person wide, that led to a tunnel angling down sharply to the west, leading under the Pioneer Building. Narrow steel-clad doors stood shut before what proved a steep metal staircase. We eased down the ancient stairs by the beam of Quinton’s flashlight. Something about the location and disposition of the narrow stairs made me think of a servants’ or workers’ entrance, even though we’d reached it through the alley. It looked as if the area had been rebuilt at some point, cutting off the original access, but I couldn’t decipher the tangled time planes of the Grey at that location to see what had once been there. The Grey was in complete disorder here, as if layers of time and memory had been heaved about by magical earthquakes.

  At the bottom of the stair was a very sho
rt corridor that logic told me dove under the edge of the sidewalk in front of the Pioneer Building. And ended abruptly in a wall.

  “Dead end,” I said, but there was something wrong about the wall. . . .

  I let everything normal slide away from me as I stared at the wall, moving deeper into the Grey until the wall was a black shape crazed with red and yellow energy threads and wisps of pale gray. I crouched down and inspected the gently waving pale threads.

  As my face drew near, I felt the thin breeze that animated them, thick with age and mud, salt water, and things gone rotten. The threads weren’t just gray in color, they were Grey in substance. I grabbed onto the web of it and pulled it apart.

  A hole had been chewed through the real wall, leaving a narrow tunnel. I turned back to Quinton, who looked more like a bulk of steam around a bright tangle of energetic strands than a person at that moment.

  “I guess it’s time to get dirty,” I said.

  He looked nervous and his eyes shifted from a spot just above my head to the rift in the wall that had been hidden by the Grey threads. I realized he was looking where my head would be if I were still standing—he couldn’t quite see me in the gloom as I crouched near the energy grid of the Grey, just as I wasn’t seeing him normally, either. I wondered if this was how ghosts saw us, but I doubted it, since most of them don’t seem to exist as close to the grid as I did.

  I pushed my way back up to the world as I normally saw it: the normal, living world, slightly misty, shot with gleams of energy and ghostlight and the watery currents of time and memory.

  Quinton jumped a little and adjusted his gaze down to me. “Where did you go?”

  “Not far, just far enough to find this. Want to see what’s at the other end?”

  “Yes, and no. It gives me a creepy feeling.”

  “Can’t say I’m thrilled with it myself, but Lass said he saw a ‘snake’ down here, and the camouflage is the same material I found before.”

  Quinton took off his hat, rolled it into a tube, stuffed it into a pocket, and started to climb into the hole.

  “Hey,” I whispered, feeling a little oppressed by the place— even a touch scared—and protective of my companion. “I see better in this stuff. I should go first.” I didn’t want to, but it was smarter. If there was something otherworldly waiting at the end of the tunnel, I’d have a better chance of seeing it than Quinton would.

  I crawled into the hole, getting unhappy signals from my shoulder and knee that no amount of working out would compensate for stupidity. I took a deep breath and crept forward into the silver-skinned gloom of the burrow. I felt the ghostly material brush against me as I went, and I could hear Quinton rustling along behind me.

  The rough bore was wide enough for us to pass through without squeezing, but the dank, dark feel of it and the smell of watery decay ahead lent our journey the feeling that we were crawling through the closing grip of a stone fist. I could hear the gentle slosh of water ahead, echoing as if we were approaching a subterranean swimming pool. A low moan, like distant wind, came and went in the hollow tone ahead and sent a shiver over my skin that left goose bumps in its wake that had nothing to do with the cold.

  I could see a hard line ahead at knee level—just a micron of harsh yellow energy against the Grey-swathed blackness of the tunnel. I felt forward with one hand, a few inches at a time, patting at the chewed floor of rubble, dirt, and crumbling cement and sliding my knees along to keep pace. My hand found a smooth platform that ended in an abrupt squared-off edge. Reaching down, I felt another smooth face and another platform. . . . Steps.

  I dragged myself forward until I could tuck my hips under and sit on the edge of the first step. My boots made a tiny splash as they touched the surface farther below me.

  I turned my head and whispered back to Quinton, “There’s a room here. It’s big, from the sound of it, and there’s water on the floor. There might be something moving around in here, but I can’t tell yet.”

  “Right behind you.”

  I stood and moved forward, sliding my feet gingerly on the slick floor. I felt liquid lap over the tops of my boots and wet my ankles. Something muttered and sloshed off to my right. Peering into the depths of the Grey, I saw the room seem to brighten with the filmlike light of ghosts and the flicker of energy.

  The floor stretched away under the water, showing marvelous geometric patterns in colored marble and stone. The walls were white marble streaked with veins of pink and gold, dividing the space into rooms and corridors of stalls with polished wooden doors. The wreck of an old oak chair bobbed slightly in deeper water way across the room. The murmuring thing lurched toward me and I caught a sharp breath in surprise.

  It was a zombie. Before it could make its way closer, I shot a fast glance around, looking for any shape that might be Sisiutl, but there was nothing above the surface that looked like a snake or a sea serpent. I shuffled farther into the water until it was up to my thighs and, wincing at the thought of what was in it, ducked my head down to look below the surface of the brackish, smelly water.

  Dimly I could see how the marble floor had subsided, allowing water to seep in at high tide through the cracks that must have formed over time. One end was misshapen by a mass of cement— probably the stabilizing material that had been poured in when the pergola above had been rebuilt. But even with the best concentration I could expend, I couldn’t see any sign of Sistu in the depths of the water and I couldn’t hold my breath much longer. I stood back up, soaking wet, and threw my hair back, gasping for air. The “subterranean comfort station” was festooned in webs of Sisiutl’s Grey stuff, as was the once-human creature that struggled nearby. Where the soft Grey strands hung, the shapes and colors of the surfaces beneath were hard to see clearly. I could see the gleam of the dead man’s life tangled in the Grey web that held his flesh in form, but I couldn’t see deeper. The moisture had attacked his skin, and where his legs had been soaking in water, they were bloated and soft, the rest of the body being slack, darkened, and exuding the rotten smell I’d whiffed in the hole. In the corporeal dark, I couldn’t make out more than its form—no face was visible—but it definitely wasn’t as close to total decomposition as the last one I’d been this close to.

  “Quinton,” I said in a low voice, “there’s a zombie here. I need light.”

  He didn’t hesitate but swished through the water to my side, clicking on his pocket flashlight and finding the sad, dead thing with its beam.

  He caught his breath in shock and his footsteps faltered a moment before he finally stopped beside me. “That’s Felix. He was the last to disappear before Go-cart and Jenny were killed.”

  “If Si— the monster had Felix, why did it kill the other two?” I wondered.

  “I don’t know. Maybe . . . this is sick . . . maybe he’s saving him for a snack? Maybe he’s like an alligator and he prefers his meals . . . aged?”

  “He didn’t really eat the others. . . .” I said, thinking aloud. “He just killed them and left the bodies behind.”

  Felix’s ambulating corpse stumbled toward us, making low noises in its decayed throat. An idea was struggling to form in my mind but crumbled away as the zombie seemed to cry out and fall to its knees, tangled in the mess of Grey threads and mud that spun across the flooded floor.

  Quinton’s light wavered and moved off the weakly struggling zombie. “Harper! Do something!”

  I admit I hesitated. Once again, I’d have to deconstruct a zombie in front of a man I liked. The last one hadn’t handled it very well. . . .

  “Get the light back on him,” I snapped. “I can’t see what I need to do.”

  Quinton directed the light onto the moving corpse and I closed the distance between us. I squatted down in the water and, shuddering with disgust, I put a hand out to touch the remains of the man. It was soft but solid, and even with the light I couldn’t see any way to hook out the trapped threads of its life. I did not want to hack the poor thing apart with a pocket knife—rev
ulsion made me turn my head aside and gag at the idea.

  “There has to be a way,” I muttered, shivering in the chilly water that had set my damaged joints to aching. I studied the zombie as I shoved it back into a more upright position.

  The dead thing slumped against the wall, possibly exhausted, but making no more large movements and few sounds now. Where it leaned against a drapery of the Grey threads, it seemed to vanish into the wall. That was interesting. The neutral Grey stuff must have been as much a form of camouflage as of holding its victims. Or was the trapping just incidental?

  The more I looked at it, the more I thought the latter was the case: the Grey web stuff was Sisiutl’s camouflage. It probably spun a web of the stuff over itself and that was how it seemed to change shape as it slithered across time and space. It was smart enough to use the same material to cover the door to this place.

  “This is its lair,” I gasped.

  “What?” Quinton asked.

  “This webby stuff—”

  He interrupted, “What webby stuff?”

  “There’s some magical material I’ve been finding around the Sistu’s sites. I told you about it. It’s all over the place here, and all over this poor bastard. I think we must be in the lair. Sistu’s hidden it with the webbing—that’s why you couldn’t see the hole until I tore the web away. And that web is all over this guy—Felix. I think that’s why his spirit can’t leave—the magical web has his energy trapped in his dead body.”

  “Well, get it off him then!”

  I really didn’t want an audience, but we had no way of knowing when Sisiutl would be coming back for his dinner and I couldn’t stand the idea of leaving Felix to be released from his prison of rotting flesh only by the bite of the monster’s jaws.

  “Damn it, damn it, damn it,” I muttered, shivering in the cold water. I needed to get the web stuff off of him and get a better look at the threads of his energy. I tried pulling it off with my hands, but the web was thicker and more reluctant to part than the other examples had been. It was as if the stuff had been knotted together, not just spun like spider silk. I’d have to untie it or find a way to cut through it. . . . My mind ground through possibilities for a moment. . . .