by John Saul
Jagger’s huge hand closed on his own. “Gonna be okay, buddy,” he said, pulling Jeff to his feet. The fire in the barrel had burned low, and the corners of the alcove had disappeared back into darkness. Jagger’s eyes darted toward Creeper, who was already on the abandoned tracks, then he nodded toward his other hand. In the fading glow of the firelight, Jeff could see that he held a large railroad spike, the tapered end clutched in Jagger’s fist, the head forming a heavy club with a hooked end. Jagger tilted his head toward Creeper. “Soon’s we get somewhere where we can see a way out—”
He spoke in the lowest whisper possible, but it didn’t seem to matter.
“You’re gonna need that thing for track rabbit,” Creeper said, not even bothering to glance in their direction. “Whack me with it, and you’ll never get outta here.” He started down the track, moving in the opposite direction from which they’d come.
Jagger watched him suspiciously. “Maybe we don’t need him at all.”
Jeff tried to see into the tunnel from which they’d arrived. If anything, the blackness seemed to have deepened. It was only a trick of his mind, he realized—the few short hours he’d spent in the glow of the firelight had deepened his reluctance to return to the pitch-darkness of the tunnels.
He switched on his flashlight, but the bulb barely lit at all, and rapidly dimmed to a small glowing pinpoint.
He remembered the voice—his father’s voice?—drifting out of the blackness. Nothing more than a hallucination.
But then he thought of the very real voices they’d heard, and the shot.
“Better go with Creeper,” he finally said. “At least he’s got a light.”
Jagger’s eyes narrowed. “I could take that away from him.”
“Even if you do, what do we do when the battery runs out?”
“Maybe we’d have found a way out of here by then.”
“And maybe we wouldn’t,” Jeff replied. He jumped down onto the tracks. “You coming?”
Jagger still hesitated, but finally nodded. “I’m with you.”
Creeper was already a dozen yards ahead of them, and as they started after him, he glanced back over his shoulder. “I’m shuttin’ off the light,” he said. “Just keep following me.” The bright beam of the halogen torch went out, and as the blackness closed around Jeff, sharp-taloned fingers of panic began to rip at his nerves. He tried to move through the darkness, tripped over a rail, yelped with pain as his ankle twisted, then instinctively threw out a hand to steady himself. By pure luck his hand found the wall and he didn’t fall. Instantly, the flashlight came back on.
“Fuckin’ idiot,” Creeper said. “Just keep touchin’ the wall and you’ll be okay.”
The light went back out, and Jeff could hear him moving again.
A few seconds later the light flashed on again, then almost immediately went out yet again. Ahead of them Jeff could hear Creeper’s footsteps echoing, and even before the light went on again, he knew the other man was moving much faster than he and Jagger.
“Fucker’s tryin’ to lose us,” Jagger muttered the next time the light came on and they discovered they’d fallen nearly fifty yards behind.
“He can’t lose us if we don’t let him,” Jeff said. Reaching out with his right hand, he felt the rough concrete of the wall. Somehow, just touching the wall steadied the vertigo induced by the darkness, and he stepped up his pace, ignoring the burning in his injured ankle.
The next time the light flicked on, Creeper was once again only a few yards ahead of them.
A few yards farther on, Creeper stopped and waited for them to catch up.
“How far are we going?” Jeff asked.
“No farther,” Creeper told him. “Now we go up.” He shined his light on the wall of the tunnel. There was another alcove here—far smaller than the one where they’d eaten and rested—but in this alcove, iron steps had been mounted in the concrete to form a ladder into a narrow shaft that led straight up. “There’s another tunnel up above. Water mains.” Without another word, he started scrambling up the ladder.
With no other choice than being left in the darkness, Jeff and Jagger followed.
After walking another ten minutes—or maybe half an hour, or even an hour—they’d climbed two more ladders and were in a third tunnel.
Far ahead, Jeff saw light.
Not the flickering, bobbing movement of flashlights, but the steady glow of electric lights mounted on the tunnel’s wall.
Creeper, putting the halogen light out for the last time, picked up his pace. The throbbing in Jeff’s ankle seemed to ease as a goal finally came into sight. They were in a utility tunnel—cables, pipes, and conduits ran along both walls and hung from the ceiling. Ahead, Jeff could see the first of a series of dim bulbs, each encased in glass and protected by a heavy metal cage, mounted in the ceiling.
As they came to the first one, Creeper stopped and turned to face them. “Welcome to the condos,” he said with the same grin he’d offered them hours ago, when he showed them their dinner. “Manhattan’s cheapest housing, all utilities included.” He stepped through a door in the wall.
Jeff and Jagger hesitated. Jagger glanced at the door, then shifted his gaze to the dimly lit tunnel that stretched ahead of them. “I think maybe we oughta keep goin’.”
Jeff, too, eyed the lights strung along the tunnel like lamps over a pathway. Creeper’s voice came from inside the door.
“We got company.”
“Anyone we know?” It was a woman’s voice, and Jeff thought he heard a note of humor in it.
“Not me. Found ’em two flights down.”
“Well, bring ’em on in—lucky they didn’t die down there. And we got plenty of food—real food, not that track rabbit some people eat.”
Creeper reappeared at the door, and along with him came a scent that filled Jeff’s nostrils, started his mouth watering and sent pangs of hunger twisting through his belly.
Stew.
Not the thin, flavorless stew that was all they’d been fed when they’d been locked in the room somewhere down in the utter darkness below. This smelled like the stew his mother used to make, pungent with herbs.
“You guys coming in or not?” Creeper asked.
It was the aroma of the stew that ended whatever doubts Jeff might have had. As he stepped through the door, he saw the last thing he would have expected to find in this place.
CHAPTER 20
Whatever Jeff expected as he stepped through the door, it wasn’t this. Not that he saw anything extraordinary—in fact, the objects that filled the chamber were utterly ordinary.
A stove—the back burner of which held the pot from which came the mouthwatering aroma of beef stew.
A refrigerator—its avocado green finish chipped, and parts of the worn-out gasket around its door missing. As if to prove it wasn’t a mirage, it rattled to life at that moment, its compressor clattering grumpily before settling into a steady hum.
A table—a real table, with a Formica top and tubular metal legs, almost identical to the one in his own apartment. And around the table, half a dozen mismatched chairs. A couple of them were made of badly scarred oak, their finish all but worn off. The others, originally upholstered in various kinds of vinyl, were now mostly covered with duct tape.
Against the wall opposite the stove was the kind of sofa Jeff had seen many times on the streets of his neighborhood, dragged onto the street for the garbage men to haul away. This one looked to be of about the same vintage as the refrigerator. Its cheap pine frame was carved in an ugly Mediterranean style, and though the crushed-velvet upholstery was stained and torn, a bit of its original gold color still showed.
There were two easy chairs, one a recliner that was extended as far as its broken leg rest would allow. The damage didn’t seem to bother the man sprawled out on it, sleeping noisily.
There were pictures on the windowless walls, but like everything else in the room, they looked as if they’d been cast off—some because the
broken frames’ contents weren’t worth reframing, others because what they depicted could only have looked good in the tourist traps where they’d originally been sold. But all of them had one thing in common: they displayed some sort of landscape, as if the pictures were serving as windows to an imagined world on the surface. One showed a meadow in springtime with deer feeding on its lush grass. Another depicted a sylvan wood, foliage ablaze in autumnal glory, with a preternatural shaft of light piercing the forest’s canopy as if God Himself were smiling down from the unseen sky.
In contrast to the fanciful pictures, the drab reality of the room was revealed by two old and crooked floor lamps, both in need of shades.
Most surprising was a television set, droning softly in the corner, tuned to CNN.
“You like my place?”
Jeff tore his eyes away from the TV screen.
The woman who was smiling at him looked to be in her sixties. Only a little more than five feet tall and heavy, her body was made to appear even larger than it was by the bulk of the clothes she wore. Her skirt was a paisley pattern in brilliant shades of scarlet, purple, and green. The bottom two inches dragged on the floor, causing the hem to be frayed and blackened with grime. Her blouse of deep burgundy velvet had rusty-looking streaks running through it, and a large, greasy-looking stain covered one side of her ample bosom. At least a dozen bracelets in as many styles jangled on her forearms, and countless necklaces and chains hung from her neck.
Her face was thickly coated with makeup that was caked in the deep crevices of her cheeks, and a bloodred shade of lipstick highlighted the wrinkles in her lips. A copper-colored wig couldn’t quite contain the wisps of gray hair that curled over her forehead.
A tattered black shawl missing most of its fringe hung over her shoulders and trailed down below her waist. “Not bad, eh?” she asked, waving in an expansive gesture that took in the entire room. The long ash of her cigarette fell to the floor as she sucked in an enormous lungful of smoke.
“If the smoke don’t get me, the cancer will,” she cackled, her eyes twinkling as she gave Jeff a gap-toothed smile. Her gaze shifted from Jeff to Jagger, and her smile—along with the twinkle in her eye—faded. She stabbed her cigarette in his direction. “Don’t remember invitin’ you in.”
Jagger’s hand tightened on the rusty railroad spike.
“It’s okay, Tillie,” Creeper said quickly. “They won’t be staying long.”
“They won’t stay at all if I say so,” the woman retorted, her eyes still fixed on Jagger.
“Come on, Tillie,” Creeper wheedled. “Didn’t you just say they could have something to eat?”
“That was before I saw ’em,” Tillie snapped back. Her cigarette jabbed at Jagger again. “Now I’ve seen him, I don’t want him. So get him out of here.”
Jeff could feel the tension building in Jagger.
“Maybe I don’t want to leave,” the big man growled.
Tillie’s eyes narrowed and she pursed her lips, smearing her lipstick even more. “I guess you can eat,” she said. “Then we’ll see.” Her eyes shifted back to Jeff, and she jerked her head toward an opening in the far wall. “There’s a place you can wash up back there,” she said. “Just make sure you put the lid back on the can if you use it. Don’t like to stink up the place.”
With Jagger right behind him, Jeff made his way through the gap in the wall.
“What is this place?” Jagger muttered as he gazed around. On a battered table sat a chipped enameled pan—exactly like one Jeff’s family had used on the camping trips they’d taken when he was a little boy—and matching pitcher. A towel, not terribly dirty, hung from a bar that had been precariously mounted in the concrete of the wall.
A naked lightbulb, hanging from a cord strung along the ceiling, filled the room with light.
On the wall above the table hung a cracked mirror, and for the first time since he’d left his cell in the Tombs, Jeff was able to see his own reflection. As he gazed at the image reflected in the glass, he barely recognized himself.
His skin was streaked with grease and grime, and his hair hung lank, heavy with its own oil.
His eyes were bloodshot, and dark circles had formed beneath them.
His forehead had broken out with pimples, and a cut on his chin—a cut he hadn’t even known was there—looked like it was starting to fester.
Still staring at his own image, Jeff finally answered Jagger’s question. “It’s their home,” he said. “This is where they live.”
In the mirror, Jeff could see Jagger glancing speculatively around. In yet another chamber beyond the one in which they stood, he could see a few mattresses scattered on the floor—one of them even seemed to have box springs under it, and all of them had blankets.
Blankets and sheets.
The exhaustion Jeff had been holding at bay as they’d made their way through the darkness of the tunnels until they’d stumbled across Creeper suddenly overwhelmed him, and all he wanted to do was disappear into that next room and collapse onto one of the beds.
“And now it’s where we live,” Jagger said. Then he winked at Jeff. “Beats the hell out of Rikers, huh?”
Jeff said nothing, looking in the mirror once more.
But what he saw was no longer a reflection of himself.
What he saw was a derelict.
The kind of person he’d long ago learned to simply ignore.
Or even turn away from, as if to deny their very existence.
Malcolm Baldridge, who had been known simply as “Baldridge” for so many years that few people except himself even remembered he had a first name, reached deep in his pocket for the single key that was never kept on the large ring that hung inside his private pantry.
His innate obsession with detail, the obsession that made him perfect for his job, caused him to check the door for any sign of tampering. As always, there was none. He slipped the key into the lock, turned it, pushed the door open, then closed it behind him before turning on the lights. One of the tubes in the overhead fixtures flickered a few times before settling in to join the others in flooding the room with a bright white light—a light that Baldridge had insisted be matched to that of sunlight.
It was a matter of aesthetics, and aesthetics were important to Baldridge.
Indeed, his sense of aesthetics was another of his prime qualifications for his job.
Before he did anything else besides pull on a pair of the thin latex gloves he always wore when he worked in this room, he went to one of the supply closets, took a replacement tube from the stock on the top shelf, and replaced the offending tube in the overhead fixture.
No sense being needlessly distracted from his work if the faulty tube began flickering again.
Then he set to work.
As always, the carcass was precisely where the team left it on nights when the hunt was successful: laid out on a gurney in the walk-in refrigerator. The refrigerator had been expensive, and the renovations required for its installation even more so, but Baldridge had insisted on it. “The odor can sometimes become offensive,” he’d explained, “and far more quickly than you might think.” Also in accordance with Baldridge’s precise instructions, nothing at all had been done to the carcass. “Restoration is my job,” he’d explained. “It’s best left to experts.” Baldridge’s own expertise was unquestionable. He’d apprenticed under his uncle, who was still working up in New Hampshire, and gained further training in a funeral home in California, moving to New York at the same time his employer in California moved across the border to Arizona in hopes of escaping prosecution for certain irregularities, only a few of which had taken place in Baldridge’s area of the operation.
Baldridge had been in his present position for nearly five years, and though few people ever saw the results of his work, he was content. Tonight he whistled softly as he removed the blankets that had been wrapped around the carcass to make it easier to transport from the site of the kill to the refrigerator.
Wheeling the gurney out of the refrigerator, he removed one tattered layer of blanketing after another, appreciating—not for the first time—the supple layer of latex that prevented him from soiling his fingers on the filthy material that always covered the carcasses. He carefully placed the blankets in a bag that would be removed to the incinerator before he left for the night, then turned his attention to the carcass itself.
A buck, perhaps twenty-five years old—certainly no older than thirty.
The carcass was in fair condition. Most of the teeth were intact, though the hide was defaced with three tattoos. One depicted a serpent, which was coiled around the left bicep, and another proclaimed love for Mother in ornate, Old English–style letters across the left breast. The third, looking exactly like a meat stamp, was stenciled across the right buttock, and identified the posterior to be US GRADE-A PRIME.
The blond hair was limp and greasy, but at least it wasn’t matted into the kind of dreadlocks Baldridge found not only unsightly, but almost impossible to work with.
The carcass was clad in the usual array of clothing, and although all of Baldridge’s aesthetic instincts told him to cut it away and dispose of it in the same manner as the blankets, he instead carefully removed it, piece by piece, and transferred it to another bag, which was destined for the laundry. After the clothes were washed and pressed, Baldridge himself would make the decision if they could be used in the final presentation. If it was only a matter of replacing a few buttons, or resewing a hem, he would perform the repairs himself. If the damage or wear proved too extensive, however, he would take them to a discreet seamstress just off Seventh Avenue down in the Thirties and have them copied.
Finally, the carcass lay naked on the gurney, and it was time to transfer it to the worktable. He slid the carcass onto the table and began preparing for the real work.
