Slumping against the wall of the tunnel, he sucked in his breath, thinking that it had been a close call, but he had made it …
That was when the others stepped out of the fog.
The closest one leaped forward faster than his eye could follow, and something reached out and clamped into his rib cage, the pointed tips of the claws biting through his jacket, shirt, and flesh. He was pinned up against the wall in a viselike grip, staring into the face of the most hideous creature he had ever imagined. Its tongue flickered as the thing drew back, balancing on one clawed foot and its long tail as it raised its other hind leg.
His last thought before it disemboweled him was a simple one: now he knew what all those rats had felt like when he used to stand over them with his club.
CHAPTER 25
CARTER
He closed the leather-bound volume, carefully marking the page with a satin bookmark, and the vellum pages crumpled together with a heavy, weighted sound. All around the desk were piles of obscure titles, some old and some contemporary: The Path of the Dragon by Liu Hsien, The Old Straight Track by Alfred Watkins, The Green Roads of England by R. Hippesley Cox, The View Over Atlantis by John Michell, Megapolisomancy by Thibaut de Castries, Alternate Realities by Lawrence LeShan, Gogmagog: The Buried Gods by T. C. Lethbridge, Memories, Dreams, Reflections by C. G. Jung, The Dawn of Magick by Sir Jeffrey Hollinsworth, The Stone Gods Awaken by L. Chance, The Necronomicon by Abdul Alhazred, Bridges Between Dimensions by Spencer Mensh, and many, many more.
Lane had spent the last three days searching through the odd collection of books, checking for cross-references, for allusions to still other pieces of the mystery. There were so many leads, so many possibilities, that at times he wondered if they could possibly touch upon what was actually taking place. That there was something preternatural taking place beneath the streets of Manhattan, Lane had not the slightest doubt.
That was not even to be questioned now; the evidence was far too great to deny it. Lane Carter had advanced to the next level of investigation: to correctly identify the phenomenon. Lane believed that with understanding came control and a loss of fear.
Under proper conditions, of course. Lurking behind his open-minded coolness was dread. It was a simple, naked fear that he was tampering with forces vastly beyond the realm of human understanding. He knew that he was standing before the door to an ancient vault, opened just a crack, with a strange light seeping out. Carter had placed his fingers in the crack and was slowly pulling open the door. Whatever horrors capered beyond the barrier could make the city their prey. Once open, Lane feared, the door could prove virtually impossible to close. It could be the beginning of a night in the city which would never see the dawn.
Lane Carter did not want to think about things like that.
Picking up a yellow pad, he began scribbling notes. They already had concrete evidence in the form of the star-stone, having witnessed its particular powers. In his readings Lane had discovered many references to stones, crystals, and other arcane objects that paralleled the Celtic star-stone. One author had even related the common water-dowsing rod to the talismans. It was obvious that many of the ancient cultures—the Egyptians, the Cretans, the Druids, various early dynasties of China, and even many Eastern European subcultures of the Middle Ages—placed much emphasis on the use of these geodetic talismans.
Lane Carter believed that the star-stone was nothing less than a kind of cosmic key, in effect, an instrument that controlled access to the lines of force. What he had not been able to determine was whether the stone could directly control the forces. Lawrence LeShan cited many incidents that argued for the existence of what he called “alternate realities”—worlds that coexist with our own plane of being. Some contemporary theoretical physicists attempted to explain alternate or parallel worlds by postulating an entire universe in which the electrons spinning about their atomic nuclei were traveling in the opposite direction of all the atoms in our universe. Hence the ideas of matter and antimatter.
But control was the key, thought Carter. He was convinced that the answer lay within his grasp. The many brilliant dabblers in the darker sciences and arts throughout the millennia had touched upon the more obscure secrets of the universe. He believed that the answers lay within the many crackling pages of the old books.
The biggest downfall of most modem scientists was their labeling of all they did not understand as magic or occult or supernatural. Carter believed that there was no such thing as the supernatural—that everything in the universe adhered to natural laws.
Scribbling upon the pad, he played with another of his major ideas. In his studies of the ley-lines, he had repeatedly come upon a startling theory that the many lines of force that crisscrossed at various points on the globe also had principal points of intersection. Watkins had termed these principal areas “nexus points.” It was at these nexus points that the concentrations of power and cosmic energy were at their greatest.
Lane Carter believed that there was a nexus point located somewhere beneath the streets of New York. By compiling as much information about the underground as possible, it should be possible to see patterns of unusual happenstance. There should be concentrations indicated on the street maps that would show peak areas of activity. These records of bizarre happenings should point to the exact location of the nexus point.
Many of the writers believed that these principal points of power were more than just wellsprings of energy. No, there were suggestions that the nexus points throughout the world were places where beings from these alternate realities could actually pass through into our world.
The missing subway train was the first indicator of this. He recalled the image of the car, silent and hulking in the darkness, immobile arid unchanged in almost seventy years. The conclusion was inescapable that the train was occupying a space and time that was not part of our world. If things from our world could slip into the dimensions of other worlds, then surely things from the other worlds could be slipping into ours.
Carter looked away from his pad and let his eyes roam over his apartment. A thought was scaling its way up through his subconscious, grappling hand over hand until it reached the surface of his mind. It was a cold, chilling question that would not go away, and every time he tried to push it down, up it came once more.
And it was simply this: if there were things entering into our world, what kind of things might they be?
CHAPTER 26
COOPER
Sam Cooper’s days and nights were a blur of shambling, nonsensory existence. He had no home, no family, no possessions other than the ragged clothes that hung from his bony frame. His life, quite simply, was a minute-to-minute foraging for a tasty scrap from a Delancey Street garbage can—perhaps a half-eaten banana, a can of pet food with some pieces still stuck to the inside, or maybe even a hunk of meat that someone had discarded because it had turned green. Sam didn’t mind the green spots. You just ate around them, or if you were really hungry, you ate them too.
His mind functioned on its most primitive level. It acted upon all those things it needed to know for survival, and it rejected everything else. Memories of his past life, his age, his background had all long since been discarded. That he had once been a shopkeeper in the South Bronx, a father of two sons, and a good husband were facts that were no longer a part of his thoughts. If someone had asked him any questions about the normal life he had once led, he would not have been able to tell about them. Sam Cooper had truly forgotten all of those things.
His associates in the Bowery, the fellow inhabitants of alleys and doorways and open manhole covers all knew him only as “Coop-the-Stoop,” and this is what he called himself now, too. He had garnered the nickname many years ago because of his stoop-shouldered gait. He suffered from a curvature of the spine that was growing worse with each passing year, and the very fact that he was able to remain alive at all was a startling testament to the miracle of evolutionary achievement that is the human body.
There were very few things that Coop-the-Stoop knew about the world around him, and all of these, of course, were connected with survival. He knew where the best doorways were in the spring and summer—the places where the police would not be likely to roust you out of a pleasant, dreamless sleep. He knew where the best alleys and garbage dumpsters were located—behind Grand Street and Mott Street, where the fancy restaurants nightly dumped whole platefuls of half-eaten meals. He knew which of his associates usually found money or bottles of cheap wine, and he knew where to find half-used cans of sterno. He pulled his clothes from dumpsters and trash bags left out on street corners for Goodwill Industries pickups, and he used old editions of the Times and the Post to pad his jackets with insulation in the wintertime.
If you saw Coop in the wintertime, you might wonder how such a rambling wreck of a man could survive when the cold winds tore through the high-walled streets like a hard-edged knife.
And if you wanted to find out, you might follow old Coop as he prepared for the coming night and the colder temperatures. If you followed him to a lonely street corner where a pry-bar was stashed in a gutter or beneath a litter basket, you would see him lift a manhole cover that led into the great serpentine conduits of steam that heated the tall buildings and powered many of the warehouse industries of the neighborhood. Nightly, Coop-the-Stoop and hundreds more of his drab battalion sank beneath the streets to seek refuge along the empty corridors of the New York Steam Company.
The huge pipes and conduits ran the length of the corridors, packed in Fiberglas insulation and wrapped in tin bands, but they still gave off enormous quantities of heat that kept the interior passageways warmer than most of the offices above. There were certain parts of the network where the old-timers would never sleep, parts of the steam system such as the bypass trunks and collecting tanks, which became far too hot. In the confined spaces beneath the streets, points such as these reached temperatures as high as 180 degrees, and there was not a bum on the street who didn’t know of some associate who was found by Steam Company employees curled up under a pipe with the flesh cooked off his bones.
The air in the streets that night carried a bitter edge, which was cutting through Coop’s clothing, and he knew he would have to take shelter down below. He shambled along Delancey Street to a corner where a lonely streetlight cast a small pool of light across the deserted street. Lifting the manhole cover with a specially crafted hook made from a discarded tire iron, Coop slid it back and slowly made his way down the steel rungs along the side of the access. Once in the corridor, he waited for his eyes to adjust to the dim light—one red bulb every forty yards or so—and felt the heat from the steam conduits seep into the marrow of his bones. Just got there, and he was feeling better already.
Gradually the dim red bulbs seemed to grow brighter, and more of the details of the tunnel were clearer to his eyes. He moved off to look for a comfortable niche. Walking slowly, Coop saw a dark shadow up ahead. At first he thought somebody else had beaten him to one of the cozier spots in the tunnel, and although he was beyond feeling any real emotion, a dull thought passed quickly through his brain that suggested disappointment.
But wait a minute … the closer he got to the dark shape, the less it looked like a man curled up sleeping. For one thing, didn’t it seem too big? Looked more like a big pile of rags, a mighty big pile. Suddenly, something deep within his soggy brain tried to spark off a warning.
He stopped, swaying gently back and forth, listening to a sound. It was a wheezing, bellowslike sound. It was the sound of something wet and labored sucking in long breaths of air.
Get away.
It was a simple thought, little more than a somatic impulse, that passed through Coop-the-Stoop.
But just as he decided to take a step back from the crumpled shape lying before him, it seemed to rise up from its dark heap like an accordion unfolding. Up higher and higher it rose until it curved over him like a caterpillar standing on its hind legs. It made a snicking sound as it shot forward, and Coop had no time to react before two sharp pincers penetrated his neck, one from each side. For an instant he felt their pointed tips meet in the middle of his throat before they released a venom that burned his insides worse than the cheapest hair tonic.
For several moments he dangled like a marionette while the creature held him, and in a final paroxysm of total nerve-shock, he convulsed violently, performing a little dance of death, his reedlike limbs moving to the pull of unseen threads.
And then there was the final darkness—an end to a life that had actually ended many years before, but had carried on a lifeless charade. Until now.
CHAPTER 27
CORVINO
The warehouse murder was a standard homicide operation. Suspecting the worst—i.e., bizarre circumstances that could not be explained—Corvino was almost relieved to see that it had been a simple heist, which the old man—a retired NYPD patrolman as it turned out—had had the misfortune to blunder into. The hoods had only meant to bludgeon him with a two-by-four, but they had cracked his skull and he was dead before he hit the floor.
This must have panicked them in the midst of their otherwise smooth operation, because half of the merchandise they were boosting was left on the loading dock, some of it spilling off into the parking lot. There were no fingerprints, but there was a fairly good set of tire imprints in the soft dirt outside, and there were indications that the alarm system had been deactivated from the inside. Provenza figured this was an inside job. Whoever had let them in was probably planning to reset the alarm later, hoping that the stolen components would not be missed until the biannual inventory.
But the job had been botched and panic would be their undoing. Corvino figured it would be a simple matter to find out which company employees had nighttime access to the warehouse, and then start checking alibis. This was going to be a relatively easy one for a change. He and John finished gathering all the initial information and then headed outside into a cool autumn day of bright sun accented by biting wind.
“What do you say we break for lunch?” said John. “This one’s going to be like connecting the dots.”
“Okay by me,” said Corvino. “But I’ll drive. I don’t want indigestion before we eat.”
Provenza laughed and climbed into the shotgun seat, and Corvino headed the car toward a deli on 4th Street that had great sandwiches. As he maneuvered through the traffic, he glanced over at his partner. “I didn’t want to bring this up while we were taking care of official business, but have you done anything about those records? Thought about it, I mean?”
Provenza nodded. “That’s all I’ve been doing. Can’t get it out of my mind. When’s the next meeting with Dr. Carter?”
“Tomorrow night. I’ll have to phone him today and tell him that we have a new member on the team.” Corvino turned left, swerved to avoid a cabbie who was in a big hurry.
“Damn!”
“Yeah, well, I’ve been thinking about it a lot. I know a girl down in Records—Lynda Green, you know her?”
“Don’t think so.” He jerked the car to a stop as the light changed from yellow to red.
“Blond, long hair, and a pretty smile. She runs one of the computer terminals. She was hot for me for a while. We went out a couple of times.”
“Oh, yeah?” Corvino smiled. “What happened?”
“Well, it was right around the time that Jack Kovaleski bought the farm on the drug raid … you know, my last partner.” Provenza’s expression changed markedly and he stared out the window, pausing for a moment. “So … I didn’t feel like doing anything for a while, you know, and I guess she got interested in somebody else.”
“But you’re still friends, right?” Corvino looked over at his partner. He was okay. Provenza was a little more sensitive than he would like to let on to most people.
“Yeah, still friends. I figure if I take her out to lunch and tell her that I’ve got a cousin doing a graduate school paper on bizarre crimes, she’ll run it th
rough the computer and get me some stuff.”
“Lunch? But that’s where we’re going now.”
“Huh?”
He looked at Provenza. “Look, we’re meeting with Carter tomorrow night. Maybe if Lynda Green can get on this today, we might have something when we all get together.”
“Yeah, that’s possible. What’re you saying, you going to drop me off back at the precinct?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying. You check it out with your lady friend, and I’ll… I’ll think of something to do in the meantime. Where’re you thinking of taking her?”
“That Chinese place up the block.”
“All right, I’ll meet you there around two. Let’s go, partner.”
Corvino drove back to the precinct and dropped off Provenza, hoping that his partner recognized how important it was to gather the information quickly. John did not yet fully realize the grim possibilities of what they might be dealing with. Driving down to Cappy’s Bar, he wondered what they were really getting into. The way Carter talked, it was nothing to be playing with. So why were they doing it? That was not even a fair question, thought Corvino. They were doing it because they had to do it. Simple, wasn’t it?
He parked the car and went into the dark interior of Cappy’s. He had a sandwich and a club soda, and then called Lya’s studio, leaving a message asking her to meet him at eight for dinner at an Indian restaurant off Park Avenue called Tandoor. He couldn’t wait to see her again. I’m falling in love, he thought with a smile.
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