Night-Train

by Thomas F Monteleone

  The slurping, sucking sounds were loud and furious, and as he looked down, he could see an unending wave of the white slimy things hemming him in. Their milky, amoebalike shapes boiled and swarmed across the floor of the sewer, attaching themselves to both his legs, up his thighs. The pain from the lower half of his body became a senseless, meaningless explosion, ripping all thought and feeling from him. He was being eaten alive, and he was going insane simultaneously.

  His hand grew slack and fell from the rung of the ladder, and as he slid into their midst, his wild gaze fell upon his feet, his legs, the feeding things sliding upward away from the gleaming bones. I can’t still be alive, he thought lazily as the blood drained from his skull.

  And soon, very soon, he wasn’t.

  CHAPTER 17

  PROVENZA

  “You don’t understand. None of you understand,” said Melvin W. Peake. He was sitting at a table in the interrogation room, staring at Dr. Isaac Roth, a psychiatric consultant with the NYPD. Then he looked at John Provenza, who had the impression that the suspect was staring through an open window.

  “Try to help us understand,” said Dr. Roth. He was a seasoned veteran when it came to handling nut cases, and he spoke in a patient, compassionate voice. “We want to understand everything, Mr. Peake …”

  John was listening to the interrogation, but he kept checking his watch, wondering where Corvino was. Lieutenant Antulov had just left the room, going out into the hallway to deal with some members of the press. At first John thought that Antulov was going to go for the gold, so to speak, and try to take the credit for busting the case, but that was probably just John’s paranoia kicking up. He didn’t really care about that anyway; he was just glad that the whole mess was over. Come on, Corvino, what the hell’s keeping you, man?

  “Could you please explain to us why you’ve been killing all those people?” asked Dr. Roth, staring intently at the subject.

  “I only killed one person,” said Peake, fingering the frayed lapels of his overcoat. “I told you that before. I only killed him. ” He pointed at Provenza.

  “Why did you have to kill me, Mr. Peake?” asked John. It was hard to believe now that this guy was their man. He looked anything but dangerous as he sat there at the table, his bony elbows spiking the hardwood surface. The guy was a real doughnut, a nobody.

  “Because of the way you treated me. I had to kill you. When you died the first time, and Aunt Ellen told me that you were gone and that you could never hurt me again, I believed her.”

  “And then what happened, Melvin?” asked Dr. Roth. His voice was almost a whisper.

  Peake continued to stare at Provenza, as though remembering something. “But then I started seeing you, without you seeing me, you know? On street corners, coming out of bars, in my store, and on the subways. I saw you a lot on the subways. I knew you were coming back to get me. I knew I had to get you first.” He looked at John Provenza with a sad, desperate expression. “Why are you working for the police?”

  “Because I’m not your father, Melvin. You just think I’m your father. My name is Lieutenant Provenza.”

  Peake smiled. “No. You’re my father. And you should be dead. How did you keep coming back, every time I killed you?” Peake looked quickly at Dr. Roth, and then back to Provenza. “You deserve to die, you know. They’ll get you if I don’t. If I can’t …”

  “Who are ‘they,’ Mr. Peake?” Roth was watching him calmly.

  “The things that live down there,” Peake said matter-of-factly.

  “What things?” asked Provenza.

  “I don’t know what they are … they’re just down there. The crawly things, and the little men, I seen them. Lots of times.”

  Dr. Roth leaned forward. “You saw these … things … down where?”

  “Down in the tunnels. In the subways. They live down there. They liked me.”

  “And how do you know that?” asked Provenza uneasily, thinking of the night in the Spring Street station when he saw that hunched little shape jump down in front of the train.

  “I could just feel it, you know? The crawly things hang on to the trains sometimes. I’ve seen them on the windows. There’s lots of little doors in the tunnels where the little men come in and out.” Peake grinned inappropriately, then started chuckling as he looked at them. His eyes were as vacant as the broken windows of an abandoned house. He looked like a real crazy, but there was something about what he was saying that bothered Provenza.

  Dr. Roth was making some notes on his yellow pad, shaking his head in a barely perceptible way. Hallucinations —that’s what he would chalk these remarks up to. He was right, too, but it sure did sound strange to Provenza. Because I saw a little man, too, right? It could have been anything, he told himself firmly.

  “How long have you been seeing these things in the subways?” asked Roth.

  “A long time.”

  “Before you started trying to kill your father?”

  “No, uh-uh. They started showing up after the first couple of times. Then I saw them a lot.”

  “Were you afraid of what you saw?”

  “No, I wasn’t afraid. They liked me. I knew they thought it was okay for me to see them.”

  Dr. Roth made a note on his pad. “I see. And do you have any idea why they thought it was okay?”

  Peake looked at him with mild surprise, as though he was amused that the doctor could ask such a silly question. “Of course,” said Peake. “Because I was one of them!”

  “What do you mean by that?” asked Provenza.

  Melvin W. Peake smiled, staring off at the far wall as if he were watching these subway creatures as he spoke. “They like it down in the dark. It feels good to them. It feels right. They can do anything they want down there. And that’s the way I was when I went down there with them. I could do anything I wanted …”

  “All right, thank you, Mr. Peake,” said Roth, shutting off his cassette recorder. He looked over at Provenza. “You have anything else?”

  “Not right now. Bellevue?”

  “Definitely.”

  “My thoughts exactly. Okay, thank you, Dr. Roth. We’ll be in touch.”

  “You always know where to reach me,” Roth said with a weak smile as he rose from the table. “We will be talking some more, Mr. Peake. Good night.”

  “Good night.”

  John opened the door, shook hands with Roth as he departed, then signaled for Sergeant Winslow, who jumped up from his desk and approached the interrogation room.

  “Make out some transfer papers to Bellevue, and get a couple of blues to make the delivery. But you better keep him in a holding cell for a while until we can get some of the press out of here. They’ll turn it into a fucking circus.”

  Sergeant Winslow nodded and called the names of two officers who were standing in the coffee room, smoking cigarettes and waiting for the inevitable call. They moved past John and escorted Melvin Peake down the corridor. He watched Peake walk calmly under the guidance of the officers, and he wondered about him and all the other nut cases he’d dealt with. The other cops often remarked on what the hell made a guy go crackers like that, but Provenza had never wondered. He knew how easy it was to slip over the edge, how easy it was for that trapdoor to the dungeon room in your brain to open. And you never knew what was going to crawl out …

  Shaking his head, he walked into the coffee room, poured himself a cup, and headed for his desk to fill out his reports. The door to the office area opened and there was a brief flurry of noise—reporters screaming and yelling out questions— which was quickly cut off as the door closed. Looking up, he saw Corvino. The dark-haired, dark-eyed detective was wearing a pin-striped three-piece suit and looked like he had just come from a formal engagement.

  “Hey, where’ve you been? You missed all the fireworks!”

  “Sorry, I had a dinner date. I didn’t hear anything till you called,” said Corvino.

  Provenza gestured his partner back to their desk in the bu
ll pen off the end of the main corridor. “He got Schleiser, cut his throat …”

  “Yeah, I heard about that. Didn’t know the guy, but hell …”

  “He was a good man. He was having trouble with his wife … this is gonna make all that shit worse. I’ll bet she feels like a real queen right about now.”

  “What about Peake?”

  “A real cuckoo. Claims he’s been killing his father all these times, and every time he killed him, the devils would bring him back to life. So he’d have to kill him again.”

  Corvino shook his head. “Crazy, but it makes sense in a weird kind of way. You write the reports yet?”

  “I’m getting ready to now. You can help me. Roth was in to see him. You’ve got to hear the tape, you won’t believe it.”

  “I can imagine,” said Corvino.

  “Then we’ve got to talk to the paper-boys.”

  “They almost tried to take my head off when I came in. They’ll have a ball with this one.”

  Provenza laughed as they reached their desk. Corvino moved to the typewriter and pulled an arrest report from the top drawer, fed it into the machine. It was their usual division of labor—Provenza did the dictating and Corvino typed it out, correcting the grammar and making their reports some of the most literate and readable in the Department.

  As John rattled off the details and the times and all the other crap, and the old black Underwood clacked along under Corvino’s direction, he felt his mind wandering. Provenza had a strange feeling that everything was not over yet. He usually felt a huge sense of relief when he wrapped up a case, especially one that had been dragging on, but this time it was different.

  There was something about the whole thing that wasn’t right. That wasn’t finished … It was just a feeling, but it was bothering him.

  He looked at Corvino as he typed out the report, and wondered if he should mention it to him.

  CHAPTER 18

  CARTER

  Lane Carter hung up the phone and drew a deep breath as he looked about the cramped confines of his office. Lya Marsden had just called to inform him that she had made the necessary arrangements to “tour” the Lexington line. A Sergeant Oliver had cleared things and all that remained was to set up a convenient time with Lieutenant Corvino, who had agreed to accompany them in their researches concerning the lost subway train.

  Carter felt his heart beating a bit faster. He had generally lived a life of academic stupor, never taking the time for adventure or excitement, other than in a scholarly and most vicarious fashion. Now, in his mid-fifties, he felt the stirrings of a new passion, a thrill at the chance to go out into the real world and be a part of it. His fascination with the odd and the bizarre had been until now a mildly arousing intellectual pursuit. He had been little more than a repository for tall tales, legends, little-known facts. Now he had been given the opportunity to test some of his ideas, to do hard, empirical research!

  In all the years that he had been compiling data, collecting scraps of information, he had never seriously asked himself whether or not he believed any of it. Some of it seemed like a bunch of mystical claptrap; some of it seemed to make sense in a cosmic kind of way. There was just too much to consider, and again, too little. And so, with little effort, Carter had always been able to nudge any concern about credibility to the back of his mind, because there was no need to do otherwise.

  But now … now was the moment of truth!

  Getting up from his desk, he walked over to the shelves where he kept his countless trinkets and artifacts, opened the left-hand door, and reached for a crystalline object, the quartz fashioned into the shape of a twelve-pointed star that so intrigued him. There was no way to determine its exact age or its origin. Carter had bought it for about ten pounds in a curiosity shop in London almost twenty years ago. The shop’s proprietor had told him that it was a Druid artifact.

  Carter had purchased the star-stone originally because he was attracted to its innate beauty, its precisely cut facets. When he looked into the depths of the stone, it seemed as though a rainbow had been imprisoned there. On and off over the years of his constant researches, he had looked for references to the star-stone, and he had been quite surprised to find a similar object described in the original writings of Posidonius, a Greek who traveled in Gaul some fifty to a hundred years before the arrival of Caesar. Posidonius chronicled many of the rites and cultural aberrations of the Celtic people, with quite an emphasis on the fire festivals, the geomancies, and the mystical concerns with the oak tree and the earth itself. In the writings of Diodorus, another Greek, Carter had uncovered a passage that described a rite of Druid priests wherein they assumed the “mantle of power” by using a twelve-pointed crystal to tap the ancient energies of the earth itself.

  Perhaps, thought Carter as he hefted the star-stone in his hand, there was some truth to the ancient writings? Perhaps this object might prove useful in demonstrating some of his own theories about the lines of force in the earth? It was Alfred Watkins who first detected the invisible tracks or lines that crossed the English countryside, and called them “ley-lines.” Another Englishman named Guy Underwood had discovered the ley-lines by means of a dowsing rod, showing that there were tracks of geomagnetic force under the earth. Other investigators had pointed out that the intersections of some of these ley-lines were under megalithic monuments and other pagan constructions. Many had postulated about the connection between these kinds of events. Some scholars believed that the evidence clearly pointed toward certain points of focus, nexuses where the powers of the earth were collected and could, presumably, be used by someone who had the proper knowledge.

  Carter also knew of the ancient Chinese science of feng-shui—“the science of wind and water”—which describes nature as a living entity. According to feng-shui, the surface of the earth was a “dim mirror” of the powers of the heavens, in other words, of the stars and the planets in astrological concerns. The Chinese believed that there were lines of power that encompassed the entire earth in intricate, but logical patterns. These were called “the paths of the dragon.” Carter thought that there might be something in all these notions, but he had never thought to seek any evidence of his own.

  The entries of Diodorus said that the Celtic shamans used “power-stones” shaped like twelve-pointed stars to locate the focal points of geodetic force. Why not try to use the star-stone in a similar fashion? thought Carter. Why not, indeed?

  The more rational side of his mind was ready to chide his more fanciful side at the mere thought of it, but he was willing to suspend disbelief for the moment. Wait and see …

  Returning to his bookshelves, he withdrew several large volumes with leather bindings and cracked spines. He placed the star-stone on his desk, and opened the first book—The Pattern of the Past by Guy Underwood. It wouldn’t hurt to brush up on a few things, thought Carter. Certainly no harm in that.

  CHAPTER 19

  MARSDEN

  The arrangements had been made. They were going under.

  Lya had arrived at Lane Carter’s office early, and now sat with a cup of tea listening to the professor thinking out loud. She hoped that Michael would be on time, that nothing would keep him late at the precinct.

  “… and in a way, I have you to thank for everything,” said Lane Carter.

  “Me? Why do you say that, Professor?” She smiled in spite of herself.

  Carter’s eyes brightened beneath his thick brows. “Why, if I hadn’t met you at that party, if you hadn’t been so doggedly insistent on finding out about that missing train … well, I would probably have remained in my ivory tower indefinitely! Contemplating, theorizing, pondering, yes—but never stepping out into the real world to test my ideas. And now I shall, and I thank you for providing the needed impetus.”

  “Just what kind of ideas do you have on all this?” asked Lya.

  Carter grinned from between hunched shoulders. “Ah, not yet, my dear Ms. Marsden. Always the reporter, aren’t you? I would
prefer to wait until after we have taken a sojourn into the dark world. Perhaps then I will have more data to throw into the hopper.” He walked to his desk and picked up the multi-pointed crystal, which Lya had previously been admiring. “Perhaps this will help me.”

  “It’s very beautiful,” said Lya. “I was going to ask you what it was, where you’d gotten it.”

  “It is called the “Star-stone” … appropriate, don’t you think? As to its origins and uses, well, we shall have to wait and see.”

  She was about to ask him another question when there came a knock at the door. Lane moved to answer, opening the door to reveal Michael Corvino, his corduroy jacket slung over his shoulder.

  “Right on time,” he said with a smile. “Let’s get started.”

  At the tower room by the City Hall station, the trainmaster, Buck Johnson, had prepared a map for them. It displayed all the tracks on the Lexington and Broadway lines between Wall Street and 23rd. Richard Frieter was waiting for them, having volunteered to act as their guide through the tunnels. After all the introductions were completed, the old man led them out of the harried atmosphere of the tower room and down a long flight of stairs.

  At the bottom, they encountered a door that opened into a mid-track tunnel, a gangway actually, which ran parallel between the north-south tunnels of the Lexington line. Every block or so, the gangway had openings into the train tunnels themselves. As they walked along, Frieter in the lead, then Lya, Carter, and Corvino bringing up the rear, Lya was constantly reminded of how old this section of the subway system actually was. Everything was covered with a fine patina of soot and grime. There was the smell of machine oil and ozone and other less pure substances.