Undertow (The UnderCity Chronicles)

by S. M. Stelmack

  Monroe stared back, setting his jaw as if weighing his options. “There is one guy,” he said after a moment, though by his expression he was already regretting his words.

  “Who is he?”

  “His name is Jack Cole. Used to be a professor.”

  Lindsay froze, went as stiff as the bodies of the homeless that turned up every day now on the city’s icy streets. “Did you say Jack Cole? Jack Andrew Cole?”

  Monroe’s hand hovered over the Rolodex. “You know him?”

  “Yes,” she replied, fond memories softening her initial shock. “We used to be best friends back in high school. I haven’t seen him in”—she did the math—“eighteen years. He’s a…a scientist?”

  “Anthropologist. Expert in urban subcultures.” Monroe set the Rolodex in front of him and began flipping. “Did a lot of work around the world. London, Paris, Rome, Moscow and here in New York. Nobody knows more about the underside of cities.”

  Lindsay shook her head in wonder. “That’s the kind of work he always said he was going to do. He could find Seline, couldn’t he?”

  “If he wanted, though I doubt he will,” Monroe said. “I guess you could say he’s retired.”

  “Retired?” Lindsay echoed.

  “About three years ago, Dr. Cole went missing in the underground during one of his expeditions. We searched for him as best we could. After a couple of weeks, we simply didn’t have resources to keep it up. He was presumed dead, and that’s the way things stayed till early last year when he finally surfaced.”

  “He spent two years underground? What happened to him?”

  Monroe eyed one of the cards, then shook his head and kept flipping. “He didn’t say.”

  “What do you mean he didn’t say?” Lindsay asked. That wasn’t the Jack she’d known. He would’ve popped up, those lion-like eyes of his bright with enthusiasm, and begun telling the world of his adventures.

  “I’m saying he didn’t say,” Monroe growled. “End of story.”

  Not for her. She’d find him and he’d help her. He wouldn’t let her down. She knew that much about him.

  “Yeah, here it is.” Monroe stopped at a card and began patting the papers in the hunt for a pen.

  Lindsay produced her own pen and paper.

  Monroe smirked as he jotted down the address. It was a few blocks from Gates Avenue, in Bed-Stuy. Though parts of Bedford-Stuyvesant were wonderful places to live, featuring beautiful tree-lined rows of century-old brownstone homes and tight-knit communities, Gates Avenue was infamous for its poverty and crime rate. She didn’t need to be a psychologist to see Monroe doubted that a professional white woman, dressed like she’d stepped off the pages of a fashion magazine, would dare set foot there.

  “You have his phone number?”

  “No,” Monroe said flatly. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a lot of work to do today.”

  Lindsay had the address memorized before she reached the door. As she was leaving, the captain called out to her.

  “Make sure you go yourself.”

  She turned in the doorway. “I beg your pardon?”

  “I said you’ll need to go there yourself. Cole isn’t likely to help you, Ms. Sterling. He definitely won’t if you hire someone to go talk to him.”

  What did he take her for? Thirty years on the force and he hadn’t figured out that appearances meant nothing. “I learned long ago that if I wanted anything done, I’d have to do it myself. Today you just reminded me of that.”

  At that precise moment, the fluorescent light burned out, leaving Monroe in twilight. It was her turn to smirk. “It’s hell being left in the dark, isn’t it?”

  * * *

  Seline woke to a sudden squeal, letting out one of her own as she bolted upright in the blackness, the sleeping bag provided by her captors twisting around her legs. She unzipped it, the opening of the nylon teeth sawing on her ears. She tried to determine the direction of the noise, or if there had been one, and not yet another hallucination. The chain that stretched from the thick collar around her throat to a concrete pillar clunked and scraped against the floor with her every move, messing with her ability to gauge sound. God, she hated the chain. Early on she’d measured it using her hands and estimated it to be fifteen feet long, not long enough to reach any of the walls in the tiled room, walls she knew existed because if she stretched her legs her feet barely brushed against them. She craved to have a wall at her back.

  She sat cross-legged on the bag and breathed deeply, the smell of cold iron and stale air filling her, and willed her racing heart, the beats impossibly loud, to slow. It took longer each time the panic attacks hit, but she calmed herself enough to allow for rational thinking. She’d been down for about a week, though time was fast becoming a shredded concept in this world of perpetual night. She’d tried using the number of times she slept to gauge the passage of days, until she realized that the lack of light and noise made her sleep too often. Or maybe not. All she knew was that she was far from the surface, in the lowest levels of the tunnels, and that despite the silence that surrounded her, she wasn’t alone.

  She could only guess how many captors there were. She hadn’t even gotten a glimpse of them before they’d pulled a sack over her head and dragged her through endless passages, her screams muffled. There were at least two of them to start with—one had held a knife at her throat while the other had bound her wrists behind her back. She now sensed that there were more. Many more.

  “Hello?” she called, her voice echoing through the chamber. She always called out after waking. It was a way of establishing contact with her captors, of reaching out to possible rescuers, of proving her humanness. She’d heard somewhere that the best thing to do if kidnapped was to try and make friends with your captors. If they saw you as a person, as opposed to just a hostage, it made it harder for them to harm you.

  “Hello?” she tried again. As usual there was no response, and it was the silence that made her more afraid than anything. She wished she’d listened to Lindsay, to that Jack Cole, to everybody. They all said the tunnels could kill. She’d gone down before, twelve times, and nothing had happened, not a whisper of anything. And then this. For the thousandth time she thought of Lindsay’s story about when she and Jack went into the tunnels as teenagers. Was she going to be ripped apart like that poor man?

  No. No. Against all odds she was alive. They would’ve killed her outright, if the stories were to be believed. Whoever or whatever was keeping her prisoner actually seemed intent on keeping her alive. She hadn’t been beaten or raped. While she slept, the provided bedpan was emptied. A stringy meat stew, palatable after hunger had hollowed her out, was regularly provided along with a bottle of fresh water.

  Only they hadn’t uttered a single word to her.

  “Listen,” she called out, repeating once again her offer. “If you contact my sister, she’ll ransom me. If you let her know that I’m alive, she’ll pay for my release.”

  Silence.

  “Her name is Lindsay Sterling,” Seline continued. “You can reach her at Sterling Restorations. Or you can call her home.” She rattled off the numbers.

  Behind her she thought she heard the slightest rustle and twisted around.

  Blackness.

  “Please. I’m no threat to you. I’ll go away and never come back if that’s what you want. I won’t tell anyone about you, promise. Please let me go.”

  Silence.

  “I only came down here to help. I’m not with the police. I’m not even a real social worker, just a student. I wanted to make the people who run this city realize that you’re down here. To make them stop ignoring you.”

  Then, a sound. It came in hushed vibrations all around her, making her heart thump wildly. From every corner of the pitch-black chamber she could hear her keepers. Ever so quietly, they were laughing.

  * * *

  The street where Jack lived was all but deserted when Lindsay reached it, the rows of cheap shops and slum housing standin
g stiff and battered in the chill morning. A bunch of young men gathered around a junker turned as her Lexus cruised by, their expressions sullen and calculating. All seemed too cold to do more than look.

  Jack’s address turned out to be a dilapidated grocery store, its barred windows smashed and brick facade layered in crude graffiti. Pulling over to the curb, she double-checked the address. Had Monroe played some kind of cruel trick on her? Surely to God, Jack couldn’t be living in a place barely fit for a rodent.

  She locked her car and wondered if she would ever see it again. Oh well, that was why she paid the outrageous insurance premiums. You shouldn’t have what you can’t afford to lose. It’s what her father had always said, and she’d made it her personal motto. She walked across the street and was about to step onto the curb when the heel on her right Blahnik got wedged in a pavement crack. She tugged with her foot, and nothing happened. The heel was sensible, a full inch across, and still this.

  “Fine,” she muttered. She unzipped the boot, slipped out her nyloned foot and hopped on the other as she began prying out the heel. From down the street, she heard the men snort in laughter.

  Yes, she could afford to lose her six hundred dollar boots. Her pride was an entirely different matter. She was not going to meet an old high school friend with one shoe. Besides, it was freezing. She went at it again with renewed vigor.

  The heel popped loose which sent her hopping madly about in all directions to keep her balance. The crowd laughed raucously, and Lindsay jammed her foot back into her boot, closed it with a most satisfying zip, and straightened. Then gasped.

  She was looking up at the biggest black man she’d ever seen in all her New York life. He was a tree, a building, a mountain. He wore a knit hat, a parka that could’ve covered her car, and tundra boots that had to have been custom-made to fit him. A brown paper bag full of groceries hung from his bear paw of a hand with no more effort than she’d hold an empty envelope. Down the two-lane bridge of his nose, he looked at her with the mild disdain normally reserved for pigeons.

  He took in her boots, her coat, her car, and no doubt, her skin color. “You lost?”

  Lindsay tried for a friendly, brisk tone. “Not at all. I’m meeting a friend. He lives right here.” She attempted to skirt around him. “I mustn’t keep him waiting.”

  The giant pulled a face and narrowed his eyes. “Here? What’s his name?”

  She dropped the friendly and kept the brisk. “Why would I tell a stranger my friend’s name?”

  His eyes widened and apparently conceding the point, he stepped aside to let her pass.

  “Thank you,” she said. “Have a nice day.”

  She got past him and headed up to the rusted metal door of the shop. She tapped on it, then banged on it. Nothing. Aware that her every move was being watched, she tried the handle. It was unlocked—didn’t, she realized, even have a lock. She glanced back to where the winterized wall of humanity stood watching her. He smiled, flashing a set of gold teeth, clearly not intending to walk on.

  “Uh, looks like he left it open for me. Must be home, then.”

  His smile glittered. “Must be.”

  “I’ll have to remind him not to leave his door open.” She paused deliberately. “Who knows who might wander in?”

  “Yeah. Good idea.”

  Lindsay didn’t know what to do, so she pushed open the door and tried to close it quickly behind her. It took a couple of goes as the door didn’t sit square with the frame. She waited, listening for the Yeti of Bedford to follow. Nothing happened, and she turned back to the shop’s interior. Or what there was of it.

  Crumbling white plaster exposed wires, and the floor was stripped straight to the plywood underlay. A patchwork of old linoleum tiles, mud-stained carpet rolls and cardboard trailed from the front door to a reinforced metal one at the rear.

  “What the hell happened, Jack?” she said under her breath. She crossed the gutted store and knocked on the metal door.

  No answer. Lindsay went straight to the door knob. It was locked. She knocked again, harder this time. Behind her, the shop door crashed open and in came the giant.

  “You ain’t getting past that one,” he said, nodding.

  “Wha—?”

  He strolled towards her, shifting his bag to one arm, while his hand dug around in the pocket of his parka. “Locked it on my way out.” He pulled out a set of keys so full that they formed a stiff three-quarters arc and selected one.

  He stepped forward and she stepped aside.

  “You live here? Not Jack Cole, then?”

  “That the name of the friend who’s waiting for you?”

  The game was up. She sighed. “Yeah, it is.”

  Again the man’s mouth broke into an amused smile. “He’ll be back soon. You want to, you can come down and wait.” He moved sideways to hold the door open for her.

  Lindsay tried not to look as scared as she was. What the hell had Monroe gotten her into? The cop had warned her to talk to Jack herself, but hadn’t mentioned anything about his living in the basement of some abandoned building with Bigfoot. Perhaps it was a kind of test. After all, if she didn’t have the guts to go down there, how could she expect others to face New York’s real underground?

  “Sure. Sounds good.” Carefully she walked down the stairwell, him clumping behind her, filling the one escape route. They emerged into a clean, spartan apartment. No, not spartan. Spartan was its own kind of style. This was absence, the kind of deprivation found in a prison cell. There were no bookshelves, no television, no phone—not even a single picture on the cracked plaster walls. The only illumination was the weak beams of sunlight that fell through a pair of small street-level windows high on the back wall. Lindsay had no sense of Jack in the bleak apartment, nothing to make it seem as if this was where he belonged.

  The black man kicked off his boots, carpeted the floor with his coat. “Sit down. He’ll be back soon.”

  Her seating choices were two chairs, an uncomfortable-looking plastic one by a small formica kitchen table, and a worn mud-brown leather armchair pushed into the far corner. Lindsay crossed the room to take up the latter.

  “So…my name’s Lindsay.”

  The man took two cartons of eggs from the paper bag, placed one on the counter and the other in the rusted fridge. “That right?”

  Lindsay was tired of being played with. “Yeah, that’s right. Now could you stop with your I-know-something-you-don’t-know game and act like a normal human being?”

  His eyes positively gleamed. “Man, I can’t wait for Jack to come back and see what I brought home.”

  “You make it sound as if I were a bargain at a garage sale.”

  He gave a soft hoot. “More than what Jack bargained for, I’ll bet.” He turned to the sink and began washing his hands under a sputtering tap. “Reggie,” he tossed over his shoulder. “I’m Reggie.”

  “I take it you’re a friend of Jack’s?”

  Reggie dried his hands on a towel that Lindsay wouldn’t have washed her floor with and took a large frying pan from one of the small cupboards. “Yeah. Something like that.”

  Lindsay took in his familiarity with the place, and had to ask, “You and Jack are…roommates?”

  “Yeah.” Reggie scrunched his forehead in sudden thought. “You asking if I’m gay?”

  The directness of his question threw her, and she reacted with her own bluntness. “I don’t care if you are. I’m just wondering about Jack, is all.”

  Reggie let out a whoop of laughter, and he fell back against the ancient yellow fridge, rocking it and holding his gut. He chugged out a succession of long motor-like guffaws. “Oh, man, I can’t wait. I can’t wait.” Gradually he subsided and began cracking eggs into the pan.

  He was on his seventh when he theorized, “Might explain why he’s so off women, but I doubt it.”

  Lindsay watched as Reggie broke all twelve eggs into the pan and proceeded to scramble them on a two-burner hot plate, his back to her
.

  “How do you know him?” Lindsay said, shedding her jacket and folding it over the back of the chair. The place wasn’t as cold as it looked.

  “How come you say you’re a friend of Jack when you’ve never come around before?” he asked right back.

  He had a point. “We were friends in high school, then he and his dad moved away, and I haven’t seen him since. I didn’t know until today that he was back in New York.”

  “You’re here to say hello?”

  Lindsay wasn’t about to go into it with Reggie. “Yeah. Something like that.”

  He snorted at having his line thrown back at him. “I like you, girl.” He shook his head. “I can’t wait.”

  When the pan had heated to a steady hissing, he tipped half of the yellow globby contents onto a plate, and ate the rest out of the pan, staring off into space as if he were by himself.

  “You live alone?” he suddenly asked.

  This time Lindsay was prepared for Reggie’s abruptness, maybe because he was a straight-shooter like her. “No. I have a niece.”

  He stopped chewing. He looked ready to ask another question when the door at the top of the stairs opened. The light from the store above briefly cast a man’s shadow down to the dim apartment. Gold teeth appeared in anticipation. “Must be him now.”

  Lindsay stood automatically. Her hand fluttered to her pale hair and she wished she’d thought to check herself in the mirror instead of watching Reggie shovel egg into his face.

  Not that she was here to rekindle a high school crush, her ears tracking the descent of the booted footsteps. Still, there was no denying it. She was looking forward to seeing Jack Cole again.

  It was Jack, but not the boy from her memories. He was a man now, of course, taller, filled out, with a rough, angular face and dark hair grown overlong. What made Lindsay stop, however, were his eyes. The amber had brightened and hardened, become the eyes of a bird of prey. Powerful and intimidating, they instantly locked on hers. Lindsay felt herself caught, held at bay. Then he looked to Reggie, snapping the connection.

  “What’s she doing here?” he asked, zipping off his parka and dropping it on the floor with Reggie’s.