“Son of a bitch,” Horlocker whispered. “They did it.”
With the exits below sealed off, the Reservoir ceased draining. However, water continued to pour into the Reservoir from the upstate aquifers. With great sizzles and pops, the level of the water began to rise again. The churning at the northward end of the Reservoir grew until the entire mass of water seemed to tremble from some kind of subterranean pressure. With a steady surge of thunder, the water rose, and rose, until at last it trembled on the edge of the embankment. Then, suddenly, it crested.
“Jesus,” Carlin said. “I guess they’re going swimming.”
A massive flood of water spilled over the top of the Reservoir and hurried away into the lambent darkness of the Park, drowning the sound of fighting with its splashing, hissing, tumbling roar. Frozen in place, staring at the awe-inspiring sight, Hayward was reminded of a vast bathtub that had been allowed to overflow. She watched as the onrush of water leveled mounds of earth and worried away the ground among small trees and copses. It was like a huge river, she thought: gentle, shallow, but irresistible. And there was no mistake about where it was headed—the low ground of the Great Lawn.
There was a moment of unbearable suspense as the onrushing water was hidden from the rioting plain that stretched beneath the Castle ramparts. Then it appeared between the trees at the northern end of the Lawn, a glistening swath of black, churning sticks and weeds and garbage before it. As it struck the edges of the crowd, Hayward could hear the noise of the fighting shift in tone and volume. A sudden uncertainty rippled through the rioters. Hayward watched as knots of people dispersed, reformed, dispersed again. Then the water was rushing over the length of the Great Lawn, and the shrieking mob was breaking for the high ground of the trees, slipping and stumbling over each other as they struggled toward the Park exits and safety.
And still the water advanced, licking around the baseball diamonds, swallowing up countless fires, knocking over trash cans. It swept into the Delacorte Theater with an immense gurgling sound, surrounded and then swallowed up Turtle Pond, and swirled around the base of Belvedere Castle itself, breaking against the stones in dark rivulets of foam. Then at last the sound of rushing water began to die away. As the newly made lake grew still, bright points of reflected light appeared on its surface, more and still more as the water grew quieter, looking at last like a vast mirror of stars.
For another long moment, the entire Command Center remained still, awed by the spectacle. Then a spontaneous cheering burst out, filling the chambers and turrets of the Castle and swirling upward into the crisp summer night air.
“I wish my old daddy could’ve seen that,” Hayward said over the noise, turning to Carlin with a grin. “He would have-said it was just like water on a dogfight. I’ll bet money he would.”
= 64 =
THE EARLY MORNING sun snuck in low over the Atlantic, kissing the sandy fork of Long Island, gliding over coves and harbors, villages and resorts, bringing a cool summer sweat to asphalt and pavement. Farther west, the brilliant arc illuminated the nearest reaches of New York City, briefly turning the gray welter of buildings a pale shade of rose. Following the ecliptic, the rays hit the East River, then burnished the windows of ten thousand buildings to a temporary sparkle, as if washing the city new in heat and light.
Beneath the thick tangles of railroad track and overhead wire that crossed the narrow canal known as the Humboldt Kill, no light penetrated. The tenements that reared up, vacant and gray as vast dead teeth, were too numerous and too tall. At their feet, the water lay still and thick, its only currents formed by the rumble of the subway trains passing infrequently on the rail bridge above.
As the sun followed its inexorable course west, a single beam of light slanted down through the labyrinth of wood and steel, blood red against the rusted iron, as sudden and sharp as a knife wound. It winked out again, as quickly as it had arrived, but not before illuminating a strange sight: a figure, muddy and battered, curled motionless upon a thin revetment of brick that jutted mere inches above the dark water.
Darkness and silence returned, and the foul canal was left to itself once again. Then its sleep was disturbed a second time: a low rumble sounded in the distance, approached in the dim gray dawn, passed overhead, receded, then returned. And beneath this rumble followed another: deeper, more immediate. The surface of the canal began to shake and quiver, as if jostled reluctantly to life.
In the bow of the Coast Guard cutter, D’Agosta stood, stiff and vigilant as a sentry.
“There she is!” he cried, pointing to a dark figure lying on the embankment. He turned to the pilot. “Get those choppers the hell away! They’re stirring the stink up off the water. Besides, we might need to get a medevac in here.”
The pilot glanced up at the craggy, burnt-out facades and the steel bridges overhead, a look of doubt crossing his face, but he said nothing.
Smithback crowded to the rail, straining to see in the lightening gloom. “What is this place?” he asked, tugging his shirt up over his nose.
“Humboldt Kill,” D’Agosta replied curtly. He turned to the pilot. “Bring us in closer; let the doctor get a look at her.”
Smithback straightened up and glanced over at D’Agosta. He knew the Lieutenant was wearing a brown suit—he always wore brown suits—but the color was now completely undetectable beneath a damp mantle of mud, dust, blood, and oil. The gash above his eye was a ragged red line. Smithback watched the Lieutenant give his face a savage wipe with his sleeve. “God, let her be okay,” D’Agosta muttered to himself.
The boat eased up to the revetment, the pilot backing the throttle into neutral. In a flash D’Agosta and the doctor were over the side and onto the revetment, bending low over the prone figure. Pendergast stood in the shadows aft, silent, an intense look on his pale face.
Margo suddenly jerked awake and blinked around at her surroundings. She tried to sit up, then clapped a hand to her head with a groan.
“Margo!” D’Agosta said. “It’s Lieutenant D’Agosta.”
“Don’t move,” the doctor said, gently feeling her neck.
Ignoring him, Margo pushed herself into a sitting position. “What the hell took you guys?” she asked, then broke into a series of racking coughs.
“Anything broken?” the doctor asked.
“Everything,” she replied, wincing. “Actually, my left leg, I think.”
The doctor moved his attentions to her leg, slicing off her muddy jeans with an expert hand. He quickly examined the rest of her body, then said something to D’Agosta.
“She’s okay!” D’Agosta called up. “Have the medevac meet us at the dock.”
“So?” Margo prompted. “Where were you?”
“We got sidetracked,” Pendergast said, now at the side. “One of your flippers was found in a settling tank at the Treatment Plant, badly chewed up. We were afraid that…” He paused. “Well, it was awhile before we decided to check all the secondary exit points of the West Side Lateral.”
“Is anything broken?” Smithback called down.
“Might be a small green-splint fracture,” the doctor said. “Let’s get the stretcher lowered.”
Margo sat forward. “I think I can manage the—”
“You listen to the doc,” D’Agosta said, frowning paternally.
As the cutter rode the water next to the dank brickwork, Smithback and the pilot lowered the stretcher over the side, then Smithback jumped down to help Margo onto the narrow canvas. It took the three of them to lift her back over the side. D’Agosta followed Smithback and the doctor back on board, then nodded to the pilot. “Get us the hell out of here.”
There was a rumble of the diesel engine and the boat backed off the revetment and surged into the canal. Margo leaned back carefully, resting her head on a flotation pillow as Smithback dabbed her face and hands clean with a damp towel.
“Feels good,” she whispered.
“Ten minutes, and we’ll have you on dry land,” Pendergast sa
id, taking a seat next to her. “Ten more, and we’ll have you in a hospital bed.”
Margo opened her mouth to protest, but Pendergast’s look silenced her. “Our friend Officer Snow told us about some of the things that grow in the Humboldt Kill,” he said. “Believe me, it’ll be for the best.”
“What happened?” Margo said, closing her eyes and feeling the reassuring vibration of the boat’s engines.
“That depends,” Pendergast answered. “What do you remember?”
“I remember being separated,” Margo said. “The explosion—”
“The explosion knocked you into a drainage tunnel,” Pendergast said. “With Snow’s help, we made it up the riser and eventually into the Hudson. You must have been sucked into the Lateral sluice that drains into the Humboldt Kill.”
“Seems you followed the same path those two corpses took when the storm washed them out,” D’Agosta said.
Margo seemed to doze for a moment. Then her lips moved again. “Frock—”
Pendergast immediately touched his fingertips to her lips. “Later,” he said. “There will be plenty of time for that, later.”
Margo shook her head. “How could he have done it,” she murmured. “How could he have taken that drug, built that terrible hut?” She stopped.
“It’s unsettling to learn just how little you really know about even your closest friends,” Pendergast replied. “Who can say what secret desires fuel the inner flames that keep them alive? We could never have known just how much Frock missed the use of his legs. That he was arrogant was always obvious. All great scientists are arrogant, to a point. He must have seen how Kawakita had already perfected the drug through many stages. After all, the drug that Kawakita took himself was obviously a later strain than that which created the Wrinklers. Frock must have been supremely self-confident in his ability to correct that which Kawakita had overlooked. He saw the drug’s potential to correct physical flaws, and he pushed that potential to its limit. But the final iteration of the drug warped the mind far more than it mended the body. And his deepest desires—his most secret lusts—were thus brought to the fore, magnified, perverted, and allowed to govern his actions. The hut itself is the ultimate example of this corruption. He wanted to be God—his God, the God of evolution.”
Margo winced, then took a deep breath, dropping her hands to her sides and allowing the rocking of the boat to carry her thoughts far away. They moved out of the Cloaca, through the Spuyten Dyvil, and into the fresh air of the Hudson. Already the pale light of dawn was giving way to a warm late-summer day. D’Agosta stared off silently into the creamy wake of the cutter.
Idly, Margo realized that her right hand was lying over a bulge in her pocket. She reached in and pulled out the waterlogged envelope that Mephisto had given her in the black tunnel not so many hours before. Curiously, she opened it. A brief note lay inside, but whatever message it had contained was now washed into faint swirls and stains of ink. Enclosed by the note was a damp black-and-white photograph, faded and heavily creased. It showed a young boy in a dusty front yard, wearing coveralls and a pint-sized version of a train engineer’s cap, riding a wooden horse with wheels. The chubby face was smiling at the camera. In the background was an old house trailer, framed by cacti. Behind the trailer was a mountain range, low and distant. Margo stared for a moment, seeing in the happy little face the ghost of the man he would become. She carefully replaced the photograph and envelope in her pocket.
“What about the Reservoir?” she asked Pendergast in a quiet voice.
“The level hasn’t fluctuated in the last six hours,” Pendergast replied. “Apparently, the water has been contained.”
“So we did it,” she said.
Pendergast did not reply.
“Didn’t we?” she asked, her eyes suddenly sharp.
Pendergast looked away. “It would seem so,” he said at last.
“Then what is it?” she prodded. “You’re not sure, are you?”
He turned back to her, his pale eyes staring at her face. “With luck, the collapsed tunnels held and there was no leakage. In another twenty hours or so, the thyoxin will have destroyed the plants remaining in the Reservoir and in the tunnels below. But none of us can be sure—not yet.”
“Then how will we ever know?” Margo asked.
D’Agosta grinned. “Tell you what. One year from today, I’m gonna head down to Mercer’s on South Street and have one of those two-pound swordfish steaks, nice and rare. And if I don’t catch a good buzz, then maybe we can all breathe easier.”
Just then, the sun broke over Washington Heights, turning the dark water to the color of beaten electrum. Smithback, looking up from patting Margo’s face dry, gazed at the scene: the tall buildings of Midtown flashing purple and gold in the morning light, the George Washington Bridge swept with silver light.
“As for myself,” Pendergast said slowly, “I think I, too, will avoid frutti del mare for the foreseeable future.” Margo looked at him quickly, trying to read the joke in his expression. But his gaze remained steady. And, eventually, she simply nodded her understanding.
AND LAST
NO ADDITIONAL Take Back Our City rallies ever took place. Mrs. Wisher was given an honorary post in the city government as community liaison, and—when a new administration was elected the following year—worked closely with it to increase civic awareness. A vest pocket park on East 53rd Street was dedicated to the memory of Pamela Wisher.
Laura Hayward turned down an offered promotion, electing instead to leave the department and complete her graduate studies at New York University.
Bill Smithback’s firsthand account of the events of that night went on to spend several months on the hardcover bestseller lists, despite heavy prepublication editing by government officials under the direction of Special Agent Pendergast. In the end, Margo persuaded Smithback—bullied might be a better word—into donating half of his earnings to various homeless missions and charity foundations.
One year to the day after the flooding of the Astor Tunnels, Pendergast, D’Agosta, and Margo Green met for lunch at a famous seafood restaurant near the South Street Seaport. Although their conversation remains their own, when they left the restaurant D’Agosta was sporting a large—and apparently relieved—grin.
Author's Note
WHILE THE EVENTS and characters portrayed in this novel are fictitious, much of the underground setting and its population are not. It has been estimated that as many as five thousand or more homeless people have lived in the vast warren of underground tracks, subway tunnels, ancient aqueducts, coal tunnels, old sewers, abandoned stations and waiting rooms, disused gas mains, old machine rooms, and other spaces that riddle underground Manhattan. Grand Central Station alone sits above seven stories of tunnels, and in some places the underground works extend more than thirty stories beneath the city. The Astor Tunnels, with their elegant stations crumbling into dust, actually exist, on a smaller scale and under a different name. No comprehensive maps exist of underground Manhattan. It is a truly unexplored and dangerous territory.
Much of what is described in Reliquary about the underground homeless—or Mole people—is true. (Some prefer to call themselves “houseless,” for they consider their underground spaces home.) In many underground areas the homeless have organized themselves into communities. Some of the Mole people who live in these communities have not been aboveground for weeks or months—or even longer—and their eyes have adjusted to the extremely low levels of light. They live on food brought down by “runners,” sometimes supplemented with “track rabbit” as described in the novel. They cook on campfires or steam pipes, and purloin electricity and water from the many conduits and pipes that run underground. At least one of these communities has a part-time schoolteacher—for there are also children living underground, often brought down by their mothers to avoid having them taken away by the state and put in foster care. Mole people do communicate in the dark over long distances by tapping on pipes. And finally
, there are homeless who claim to have seen a fabulous, decaying nineteenth-century waiting room deep underground, with mirrored and tiled walls, a fountain, a grand piano, and a huge crystal chandelier, similar to the Crystal Pavilion described in Reliquary.
It should also be noted that in certain important instances the authors have altered, moved, or embellished what exists under Manhattan for purposes of the story.
The authors feel that it is not asking too much of our wealthy country that the underground homeless be given the medical care, psychiatric help, shelter, and respect that should be the basic rights of all human beings in a civilized society.
The authors are indebted to the book, The Mole People, by Jennifer Toth (Chicago Review Press, 1993). Readers interested in the factual account of the subterra incognita of Manhattan are urged to read this excellent, thought-provoking, and at times frightening study.
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Reliquary Page 43
