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.
AUTHORS’ 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 parttime 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.
“Preston and Child carry off this sequel with great energy and panache. In particular, their portrait of the underground dwellers lifts this thriller into a category all its own.”
—Chicago Tribune
“Reads like a summer roller-coaster flick.”
—Philadelphia Inquirer
Hidden deep beneath Manhattan lies a warren of tunnels, sewers, and galleries, mostly forgotten by those who walk the streets above. There lies the ultimate secret of the Museum Beast. When two grotesquely deformed skeletons are found deep in the mud off the Manhattan shoreline, museum curator Margo Green is called in to aid the investigation. Margo must once again team up with police Lieutenant D’Agosta and FBI agent Pendergast, as well as the brilliant Dr. Frock, to try and solve the puzzle. The trail soon leads deep underground, where they will face the awakening of a slumbering nightmare.
“The sequel to the popular Relic hits all the right buttons for those looking for thrills and chills from things that go bump in the night…. Another page-turner that cries out for translation to the silver screen.”
—The Orlando Sentinel
Reliquary (Pendergast, Book 2) (Relic) Page 44
