by Chuck Wendig
– from the Journals of John Atticus Oakes, Cartographer of the Great Below
He’s got one option left before he heads off to see Smiley: the Sandhogs.
Come morning it’s back into the city. He slings his satchel over a beefy shoulder. Throws some loose provisions in there: some jerky, couple bottles of water, bandages, some other odds and ends. Then it’s off to the dig site.
See, in the middle of Lower Manhattan sits a big fucking hole.
It’s as wide as the base of the Chrysler Building. Not nearly as deep – not this one, anyway. This one’s maybe four stories down, with a series of branching tunnels leading off it. It’s a hub. A hub to bring the diggers to various jobsites – the new water tunnel (#3), the new tunnel opening the 7 line of the subway, and other smaller projects.
All around the hole is a massive worksite. Forklifts rumbling. Shipping containers clanging. Wire bails and fuel tanks and thousands of bags of concrete.
He never worked this site, but he worked others just like it. Smells of churned dirt and blown stone, of grease and exhaust and oil. And sweat. Above it all, the vinegar stink of sweat. Sometimes it’s hot down in the dark, sometimes it’s cold, but with all the gear the Sandhogs have to wear – the galoshes, the slickers, the overalls, the hardhats, the masks – you can’t help but sweat.
I don’t belong here. That’s the thought that keeps going through Mookie’s head, tumbling over and over again like a rock bouncing down a mountain.
He used to belong here. Thirty years ago. When he was a young buck, just out of high school (more like just failed out of high school). Working his father’s crew. His grampop up in the work trailer, pushing a broom, shoving a mop, missing his left leg at the knee and hobbling around on a leg the guys made for him, a heavy-ass limb made out of a wooden salad bowl, some leather straps from an old hospital gurney, and a length of rebar.
Grampop was tough as they came. Like the beef jerky in Mookie’s bag. No fat, no gristle, just dehydrated muscle and hard leather.
Not to say his father wasn’t tough, too. Pop was built like an oil drum. Lower teeth missing from when a rock popped up, dislodged by a hammering jack-leg, smacked Pop right in the mouth. Tongue swollen for weeks. It earned him a new nickname: Rocky.
Pop was a fire-plug of a man, but even he was afraid of Grampop.
Grampop would hear about something you did on a job and he’d thump you with a mop-handle and dress you down in front of all the guys – and he was a quick wit, his tongue a loose and lashing cable. Mookie remembered him calling Pop a “thick-necked buffalo with a brain like a shit-bucket”. One time Mookie wasn’t paying attention in the tunnels and put a ladder down on loose scree – the ladder came falling on top of him, cracked him in the head, gave him a concussion. Grampop said, “You’re dumber than a truck full of broken toilets, slower than cold molasses, lazier than a car-struck cat, and uglier than the inside of a donkey’s asshole.” All the men brayed with laughter as Mookie stood there, his face a mask of dried blood from where the ladder had hit him, and that made Mookie mad – he suddenly took a swing at his father’s father. The old man ducked the fist like a bum sidestepping a slow-moving train.
Then he fired a knee up into Mookie’s balls.
He followed it up with, “You got a hard head, Mikey. Hard as diamond, but nowhere near as pretty.” Then he shoved Mookie back into the lockers.
More laughs. Haw, haw, haw. Assholes.
And it’s those laughs Mookie hears when he steps into the work office – really, a trailer, but a trailer that probably hasn’t moved in ten years. Up on cinderblocks. The side of the trailer facing the hole is caked with dust, the rime of blasted rock.
Inside are the Sandhogs – some about to go on shift, some about to go off, others who are new to Local 147 and hoping to get some work for the day. Mookie walks on the dirt-smeared linoleum, past rows of lockers marked with masking-tape labels showing nicknames like “Weasel” and “Little Blue” and “Mudcrab”.
He steps into the main area – guys sitting on benches, guys playing cards around a little side table – and eyes turn to him. They’re all hard-asses. You can’t be a Sandhog – one of the best-paid and most dangerous union jobs in the whole goddamn country – and not be a hard-ass, because candy-asses either get pounded to silt (and quit) or turn hard as stone (and stay on the job). So, these hard-asses know another hard-ass when they see one.
They don’t recognize his face, though. And he doesn’t recognize them, either. These are younger guys, mostly. He sees a couple veterans in the back: some old ratty strip of rope with his hard hat still on standing next to a doughy three-chinned dumpling of a man with a Santa’s beard and a pair of industrial-grade eyeglasses too big for his already big head.
Mookie maybe recognizes Santa, though doesn’t remember his name.
It’s the two old vets who stand and wave him toward the back. As it should be. The young guys are faster, tougher, but they’re not the alpha dogs in an operation like this. The old hats, they’re the ones who know what’s up; you piss them off, they’ll leave you down there, floundering in the dark with your dick in your hand.
The shriveled length of rope whistles through busted teeth. “You need something, big fella?” The Santa Claus motherfucker just eyes him up.
Mookie nods. “Looking for Davey Morgan.”
“Davey Morgan?” Skinny Rope lifts a furry eyebrow. “He’s on site.”
“Then I need to go on site.”
“He’s in the tunnels. Way down.”
“Then I need to go way down.”
“He’s not available. Sorry, big fella. Now scram the fuck out of here.”
Mookie feels agitated. And suddenly angry. Half-afraid that Grampop’s ghost is going to come up out of nowhere and whack him on the back of the head with a loaded dustpan, tell him he’s “more useless than pair of tits on a lawnmower”.
It’s then that Santa speaks up. “You’re the Pearl boy.”
A turn of the worm inside Mookie’s heart.
Mookie gives him a look like, Yeah, so?
“I remember you. Hard not to. Geez. You’re built like a stack of boulders. I knew your dad a bit. Good Hog. Knew his way around a concrete mix.”
Skinny Rope lifts the other eyebrow. “Pearl. You mean Brosie Pearl?”
“Nah,” Santa says, waving a hand that Mookie can see has the crinkly flesh of a burn scar all up the back of it. “Ambrose was the old man. I’m talking about Henry. The son. Rocky, we called him. And that makes you…” He snaps his crusty fingers. “Little Mikey.”
“Mookie. I go by Mookie these days.”
“Right. Right. You worked with Davey Morgan down there.”
“Uh-huh.”
Santa leans in. “I remember it right, you bailed on us. Left the union.”
“I had other things to do.”
“I bet you did. I bet you did.” The way Santa is sizing him up, he knows. “You were with Davey, that means you were with the 147½. That right?”
“That’s right.” The 147-and-a-half: the union inside the union, a cabal of Sandhogs who know what’s down there and who serve as the first line of defense between the city above and Hell below. They don’t usually run afoul of the Organization, but it happens – the Organization wants the resources the Deep Downstairs has to offer, but the Sandhogs think all of it should stay corked up and kept from the light. “What of it?”
Mookie doesn’t bother answering.
“So then you know Davey’s busy. And you know that there’s no way I’m letting a quitter like you down in the dark on our territory. Davey’s not your business. OK? His business is not your business. So, go home, Little Mikey. Go back to your other friends.”
He knows. He knows who Mookie works for. Santa Claus knows that he’s been naughty, not nice. Skinny Rope doesn’t know elf-piss from egg-nog: he’s following the conversation the way one does when the other speakers are talking a different language. But not Santa. Santa sees all.
Mookie growls. He’s not fond of being told “no”.
“Ease off the stick, Cochise,” Santa says. “You’re a big ape used to throwing your weight around, and I don’t doubt you could punch my fat old head into next week. But you got a whole trailer of mean sonofabitches behind you, and worse, this site is watched by Homeland Security. We got big projects going on. Important projects. Not to mention an unholy hell’s load of dynamite down there. You go knocking guys around here and they’ll throw your ass in an unlabeled hole for the rest of your years. That what you want?”
Homeland Security? Jesus. Things have really changed since 9/11.
Mookie just shakes his head.
“Then let’s just cut this short and say goodbye. Goodbye, Mikey Pearl.”
“Mookie.”
“Whatever, kid. Get outta here.”
Kid. The old lump of bearded fat called him “kid”. Mookie’s a couple years shy of his fiftieth birthday, and even still, some senior citizen Sandhog calling him “kid” gets under his skin, lays eggs there, eggs that hatch and whose larvae burrow deep.
The ghost of Grampop is somewhere here, laughing at him.
He can still get down there. Into the tunnel. Mookie’s always got a bolthole and long ago he made sure to carve himself a couple doors into the length of the tunnel – doors that’ll one day need to be sealed up before the gates open and the water comes rushing in, but that’s three years off, easy.
It’s just a long fucking walk. He was hoping to circumvent the trip. He’s tired.
But, what else is he gonna do?
Once more, descent awaits.
It’s eight or nine hours of crawling around through too-tight tunnels and ducking his stubbly dome underneath jagged rock that Mookie finally comes to one of his bolthole doors. It’s hidden. It has to be – elsewise any goblin or cult freak or amateur explorer could find it. This one behind a crumpled old refrigerator (the Shallows of the Underworld end up as home to lots of junk and trash, the debris of a humanity that doesn’t care where its waste goes long as it’s out of sight). Mookie has to hunker down, shimmy the fridge out, then squeeze through.
Then, twenty feet down, a big rectangle of schist. Which he cut through using a gas-powered cut-off saw about four years ago.
Mookie steps into the tunnel. He turns off his flashlight – the space is well-lit and his eyes take a moment to adjust.
The tunnel’s big enough to drive a tractor trailer through. It’s cool in here. Up above, strings of sodium lights hang. Everything in a yellow glow, like morning light through a windshield smeared with tree pollen.
Here, the distant sound of the city. The gung-gung-gung of subway trains. The rumble-and-hiss of steam somewhere behind and above the rock. The white noise of a million machines and devices: cars, trucks, boats, cranes, drills, all forming a meaningless mumbling hum. Mookie finds it all oddly comforting.
This isn’t the Water Tunnel proper. That’s further down – he’s got boltholes that’ll take him right into the tunnel, but getting there would take him another half-a-day’s walk and right now there’s just no need.
It isn’t long before he gets to another hole, this one ringed by lights. Bundles of cables and pipes disappear down over the craggy lip and into the pit. The pit sits ringed by a metal handrail. Mookie steps up. Looks down.
Down, down, way the fuck down.
The skyscrapers in the city above do as their name suggests: they are physical objects that scrape the sky.
This is the opposite. This is negative space, a carved out channel of rock and stone that’s over four hundred million years old – it doesn’t scrape the sky, but like a needle plunged too deep, it perforates the membrane between this world and the next. Or, it did, when they first dug it out. Now it’s walled off, fortified in ways not easily seen or understood.
But Mookie remembers this shaft.
This isn’t how a lot of the Sandhogs get to the Tunnel #3 dig now – no, there’s a much bigger hole down in Battery Park, a straight shot eight hundred feet into the earth where they can drop trucks and where just a few years ago they lowered a mammoth tunnel boring machine, “The Mole”. That beast, a 450-ton driller, meant to do a lot of the dirty work of making the tunnels, work that once necessitated tons of dynamite and guys who knew how to make the right blasting plans so as not to bring half the city down on their heads. Dangerous work – one of the Sandhog mottos is “a man a mile”. Because for every mile of tunnel they dig, another man dies.
This way’s easier for Mook.
The way down the shaft: a blue cage. Meant to hold five men, but Sandhogs cram ten or twelve guys in there, easy. Still. Mookie steps in and it’s cramped. A feeling of claustrophobia tightens around him like a fist: part of it’s the cage, but part of it’s the fact that a whole city is above his head. Like he’s Atlas holding up the Earth on those big-ass shoulders. Once upon a time that feeling comforted him the same way that feeling a belly full of good food comforted him. But time hasn’t been kind to his nerves.
Mookie punches the button. The motor grinds. The cable thrums.
The cage drops.
A pair of wavy yellow cables snake along the wall. A big fan blows air. A pipe for concrete is bracketed against the wall – it’s a “slick line”, used to pump the wet mix over a thousand feet from the worksite above. Glimpses of civilization. Of human work and effort. The Sandhogs have claimed this part of the Underworld for mankind. The trappings of man are all here: a pickaxe in the stone with a hardhat on the handle’s end, a discarded and dented lunchbox, a crumpled-pack of cigarettes, a lone boot crusted and made heavy with dry cement.
So much cleaner than many of the low places he finds himself in. Rooms laden with glowing polyps. Black stalactites like swords dripping blood. Hell, a month ago he found an old subway train car down at in the Tangle when he was looking for a couple wayward Mole Men. The train sat on a soft sand island out in the middle of a steaming subterranean lake – it was the moans that drew him to it, the very human moans. Inside: bodies. Vagrants, by the look of them. Mostly dead but kept alive by the gobbo eggs in their mouths, under their armpits, between their legs. The moist places of the human form.
Mookie burned the whole car. Not much else to do. The eggs, bulbous and red, were ready to hatch. The guys were dead anyway, they just didn’t know it yet.
He wonders what normal people would think of the way the eggs popped and squealed, like bacon fat in an iron skillet. What face they’d make when they saw the bodies thrashing around, the little gobbo hatchlings born premature, splashing up against the sooty train windows before finally expiring in a red squeak down the hot glass.
People just don’t know.
Finally, Mookie gets to the start of the tunnel proper. A massive concrete tube. Lit up like it’s practically daylight down here. Floodlights eliminate darkness. Big fans blow cool, musty air. In the middle of the tunnel runs a set of tracks – the Sandhogs don’t use old-school mine carts anymore. They use powered ones. “Pigs.” That’s what they call them. As in, “Hop on, the pig’s about to leave.”
There’s a small three-man pig nearby, sitting away on an ancillary track. Mookie feels relieved. The powered mine carts don’t move fast, but they move a lot faster than walking. And it’ll save him a ten-mile walk to wherever Davey and his crew are working.
He hops in. Starts it up with a growl.
Doesn’t take long to ease it on the track–
Soon Mookie’s chugging along. Bright lights passing overhead.
Chug chug chug.
This tunnel, Mookie thinks, is the Sandhogs’ legacy.
They’ve been working on this for years. Hell, this tunnel’s where Mookie got his start, and really, that’s what he’s thinking about: how this could’ve been his legacy instead of what it is now. Ex-wife. Daughter who hates him. Breaking the heads of goblins and the knees of addicts.
He never gave much of a shit about the tunnel. To him it was just work. To the city of N
ew York, it was them building a parachute while falling down to earth. Both of the original water tunnels are on their way out and the water in the city is undrinkable. Repair either of the original tunnels, you turn the water off for weeks, maybe months – and if the valves break, then longer. The city loses water, the city loses everything. But for Mookie, it was always just work. Because that’s what he does. And that’s who he is.
Though now it occurs to Mookie: that’s why Homeland Security is invested. They don’t want terrorists messing with the city’s water supply.
Up ahead, he hears it:
The sound of work.
Hammering. Drilling. The murmur of men yelling.
But that’s when he hears something else, too:
The scrape of claws on concrete. The whisper of flesh on stone.
6
The monsters of the Abyss. Offspring of the Void. The children of the Hungry Ones, of the Deep Shadows, of Those Who Eat. Birthed from the Maw-Womb, given life down in the dark – wriggling, screaming, baying for blood and singing lamentations to the lack of light. The gobbos, or goblins, those most common denizens of the Great Below – half-mindless, willing to eat their own young grubs, a tribe or hive of peons and pawns, Hell’s own foot-soldiers. The Trogbodies or troglodytes, blind golems of stone and clay and silt. The Snakefaces – or Nagas and Naginis – those hidden seducers, those worms in the rock. They, the named races, the sentient entities. Some are lesser beings with minimal minds: the roach-rats, the milk spiders, the gelled waste, the rimstone cankerpedes. Others are smart but have no names: I have seen a dripstone that unmoored from the rock and spoke riddles before scurrying away. I have seen a flying thing, with gray vented wings and eyes on telescoping stalks. And I have seen a tenebrous shape stalking the depths, darker than the dark, like a black sheet on a clothesline rippling in a hard wind.
