by Kat Ross
The next book in the Gaslamp Gothic series is now available at most online booksellers! It’s called Dead Ringer and returns to New York, where Harry and John of The Daemoniac find themselves embroiled in a rash of mysterious deaths at Columbia University. Read on for a sneak peek of Chapter One and the full back-cover description.
Join my newsletter for updates and special offers, including a free book. In the meantime, if you want to find out more about Balthazar’s early years as a necromancer serving Queen Neblis, check out The Midnight Sea, which is free to download on all retailers. Cheers, Kat
Chapter One
August 31, 1889
It all started with some drunk boys from Brooklyn.
They were walking back to the Sixth Avenue Elevated after a night of carousing in the Tenderloin when they claimed they were assaulted by a large, lurching thing that reeked of the sewers. As one might guess, the patrolmen of the Twenty-Ninth Ward failed to take the story seriously. When they finished laughing, they arrested the boys and tossed them in a cell to sober up.
But over the next two weeks, more monster sightings were reported in the same area. Whatever it was, the thing only came out at night. After it attacked the son of a Tammany Hall bigwig, shoving him into the gutter and spraining his wrist, the boy’s father kicked up enough of a fuss that the Ninth Detectives Division was called in.
Commissioner Thomas F. Byrnes had quietly formed the new unit in the spring of 1889 after the Hyde case and the museum murders. I suppose he chose the bland name to keep it under wraps, but everyone in the department called it the Night Squad. It specialized in bizarre cases and often worked in cooperation with my own employer, the American Society for Psychical Research.
Which is how I found myself staring into an open manhole on a scorching Saturday night at the tail end of August. My best friend John Weston stood next to me, along with an engineer from the Croton Aqueduct Department. We all wore rubber boots.
“I’m starting to hate this case,” I muttered.
It was not our first foray into the sewers.
John flashed his dimples. “Now, Harry, it could be worse.”
A lock of sandy brown hair had fallen over one eye. The other glinted with excitement. He was actually enjoying himself, I thought sourly.
“How?” I crossed my arms and gave him a skeptical look. I wore an old shirt and trousers that had been passed down through the ranks of John’s four brothers. The material was already damp with perspiration and I knew it would be even more hellish down in that hole.
He studied the sky with a thoughtful expression. “Could be raining.”
I conceded the point. New York made its own vile gravy and it all drained into the labyrinth beneath our feet. After weeks of investigating the sewer beast, as John called it, I knew far more about Manhattan’s plumbing than I’d ever wanted to.
The manhole was on the east side of Thirtieth Street and Sixth Avenue in the shadow of the elevated tracks. It was a little after midnight and the various gambling hells, brothels and dance halls were going full tilt. Reformers had dubbed the Tenderloin “Satan’s Circus” and they weren’t far off the mark. I counted six saloons within spitting distance, bearing names like the Star and Garter, Buckingham Palace, and less appealingly, Chick Tricker’s Flea Bag.
Whiffs of French perfume mingled with beer and tobacco smoke. Music and laughter drifted down the street. A tiny elfin man in a sagging flannel suit preached the gospel to indifferent passersby, declaiming loudly about the wages of sin.
In short, everyone was having fun except for us.
The latest victim stood adjacent to a group of six patrolmen, who were keeping their distance. They’d thrown a horse blanket across his shoulders, but I could still smell him from ten feet away. Albert Wood fit the usual profile: male, early twenties, on his way home from an evening with friends at some fine establishment called The Billy Goat, where you could get two drinks for a nickel. He said he’d been thrown to the ground and trampled by a “mud man,” which then vanished into the manhole.
Judging by the odor that wafted in our direction, I deduced that “mud” was a polite euphemism.
Mr. Wood looked unhappy and dazed, which was entirely understandable.
“I don’t think we can wait any longer for Sergeant Mallory,” John said, his boot tapping impatiently against the manhole cover.
I drew a deep breath. “We’re heading in,” I called out.
As a rule, policemen are a superstitious lot. These showed no sign of wishing to accompany us down the ladder.
“Happy hunting,” someone said cheerfully.
The engineer, whose name was Albanesi, gave a curt nod. “I’ll go first,” he said.
We watched Albanesi descend the iron rungs into darkness. When no shriek of horror came from below, I followed him down, with John just behind me. A patrolman lowered three bull’s eye lanterns, their cones of light dancing wildly over the brickwork.
“If we’re not back in an hour, send reinforcements!” I shouted.
One of the cops stuck his head into the hole. “Sure thing, Miss Pell,” he replied seriously.
I heard laughter in the background.
We stood in a round tunnel about twelve feet high and eight wide. A stream of dirty water flowed south through a shallow channel cut into the center. It reeked of horse manure and other nameless waste.
John raised his lantern while Albanesi consulted the map. The engineer was in his late forties, with the black eyes and hooked nose of southern Italian stock. He sported a large handlebar mustache which I found reassuring. It was a mustache that had no fear of mud men.
The engineers of the Croton Aqueduct Department were a hardy bunch. They had built the sewers and seemed protective of them. When Mallory’s Night Squad requested its expertise, the department had obliged — to our eternal gratitude. Navigating down here alone would have been an even bigger nightmare. Manhattan island had almost four-hundred and fifty miles of pipes and mains, and more than five thousand receiving basins.
The sewers flowed on gravity and emptied into the city’s waterways. Most were too small to enter, but the one we stood in allowed the engineers access for maintenance of the pipes and to carry storm runoff. These larger tunnels roughly followed the grid system of the streets above.
Albanesi’s map bore pencil marks with the locations of the previous sightings of the mud man, which were clustered in an area bounded by Fifth and Seventh Avenues, and running from Twenty-Eighth to Thirty-Sixth Street.
“Which way?” he inquired, his black brows arching.
John exhaled a soft breath and studied the map, though we both knew the pattern of dots by heart. It had been a little over an hour since Albert Wood was attacked. The creature (or prankster — I still held out faint hope) could have gone in any direction. But as I stood in the damp, oppressive atmosphere of the sewer, I caught a whiff of something indefinably loathsome.
I followed my nose down the left wall of the tunnel, sweeping the lantern beam across the bricks. They bore traces of dark-colored muck leading off into darkness. “Over here,” I called.
Albanesi folded the map and returned it to his pocket. We inspected the streaks more closely. Most were at shoulder height, but I observed a few on the ceiling as well. Albanesi’s gaze lingered on the moist splotches.
“What if we find it?” he wondered with a touch of unease.
“Not to worry,” John replied with supreme confidence. “We aren’t permitted to carry firearms, but we do have legal authority to detain any suspects for Sergeant Mallory.” He patted his pocket. “I’ve got a set of double-locking handcuffs right here.”
Albanesi glanced at him and said nothing. He didn’t seem reassured.
Personally, I felt irritated that Mallory had failed to join us on this subterranean monster hunt and didn’t even bother to send any of his men. Had the Night Squad given up on the sewer beast? No one was dead yet so technically it was still in the nuisance category, but I had
a bad feeling that could change.
“The main thing is we’ve got the trail,” John said. “Nice work there, Harry.”
We started walking in single file, sticking to the sides of the tunnel where the ground was drier. I resisted the urge to look back as the open manhole dwindled behind us and darkness closed in save for the three beams cast by the lanterns. The light could be dampened with a quick twist of the wrist in case we wanted to lie in wait for the creature – a tactic we’d tried before with no success. It was either very smart or very lucky, probably the latter.
“What do you think it is?” Albanesi whispered to me.
I met his eye with a shrug. “Mud man.”
“But what does that mean?”
“You should ask Mr. Weston. He’s the expert on these matters.”
Albanesi turned to John, who squinted down the tunnel with a steely gaze like Davy Crockett on the trail of a rampaging grizzly.
“I have a few theories, but I prefer not to speculate until we’ve gathered more facts,” John said.
I knew that meant he had no idea what it was either, but Albanesi nodded gravely. After several minutes, the trail doglegged into an intersecting tunnel and turned east. The flow in the center cut grew clearer than the brown murk we’d been following.
“There’s an ancient stream that runs parallel to Broadway,” Albanesi explained. “You see, the topography of New York is essentially the same as it was when the Dutch settlers arrived, even if it’s been diverted below ground. Spring Street, for example, is named after an actual spring….”
I nodded distractedly as he gabbled on. Despite the merry stream splashing at our feet, the air was still close and foul, freshened only by the occasional storm drain in the street above. At last, the engineer’s lecture wound down and we walked in silence, broken only by the monotonous squeak of one of John’s rubber boots.
How had it come to this?
I had joined the Society for Psychical Research the previous winter at the age of nineteen after gaining some small notoriety by successfully concluding the Hyde case with John’s assistance. Employment at the S.P.R. was the culmination of a lifelong dream. We investigated everything from hauntings to clairvoyance, astral projection, mesmerism and demonic possession. I’d embraced the work with enthusiasm even after I discovered that much of it involved not debunking the supernatural, as I’d been led to believe, but doing battle with it.
Over the last six months, we’d solved another gory murder at the American Museum of Natural History and looked into a rash of precognitive dreaming at an elite girls’ school, which turned out to be an elaborate hoax. John continued to act as a consultant with the S.P.R., though his studies at Columbia’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, where he was a second-year student, took up most of his time.
I glanced over, glad as always to have him at my side — squeaky boot notwithstanding. Our fathers were old school chums and we had been close friends since childhood. At twenty, John still had the same innocent, boyish features that always persuaded my housekeeper to give him an extra slice of her famous plum cake. Now his brown eyes were alight with excitement. John lived for these kinds of adventures. He was big and athletic and totally lacking in a healthy fear of dark, confined spaces.
I, on the other hand, was growing restless.
Our recent assignments had left something to be desired. Frankly, they were small potatoes. I craved a case that would challenge my faculties of deduction, and the mud man was not it. We had interviewed every victim, searched endlessly for some kind of pattern, but they had nothing in common and seemed to have been chosen at random — or simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I remained open to the possibility of a ghoul, those undead spirits that returned in various forms to plague the living, but this was unlikely given that it hadn’t killed anyone. Ghouls were ruthless and predatory. This creature seemed bumbling, which made me wonder if it wasn’t a couple of kids scaring people on a lark. We’d searched the tunnels for hours on prior occasions and found nothing.
And now the trail seemed to have petered out again.
My lantern beam played over the black water, which slowed to a trickle. Almost imperceptibly, the tunnel walls had narrowed and the ceiling had lowered. Now my claustrophobia, held tightly in check, reared its head.
“Where are we?” I asked in a low voice.
Albanesi halted and pulled out the map, tracing a convoluted route with one finger. “Let’s see. We followed Broadway up to Forty-Second, crossed back over to Sixth Avenue, and then headed south again. I’d reckon we’re nearly back at the manhole on Thirtieth Street.”
I sighed. The thing — or idiotic prankster — was probably long gone. I prodded John to check his pocket watch and learned we’d been walking for nearly an hour.
“Well then,” I said, relief mingled with annoyance at another wasted night I could have spent sleeping. “I say we head out. Perhaps Sergeant Mallory has arrived. We can give him our report, for whatever it’s worth.”
Albanesi nodded. He seemed as eager as I was to escape this purgatory. “The ladder should be just ahead.”
“I really thought we had it this time,” John muttered as we resumed walking.
“Yes, it’s a shame the thing got away,” I lied. “They’ll just have to flood the area with patrolmen. Catch it in the act.”
The thought cheered me considerably. Let the flatfoots of the Twenty-Ninth Ward deal with the mud man. It was their turf, after all. The sewers were too vast and complex to track an elephant through – even Mallory would be forced to concede the point. And with any luck I would be reassigned to something more interesting. Above ground.
After a minute I saw the glint of metal fifty yards ahead. The ladder! My spirits soared at the prospect of fresh air, of drunken voices and bright lights. Then John wrinkled his nose. “Do you smell that, Harry?”
“I stopped smelling anything half an hour ago,” I replied.
We looked at Albanesi, who nodded. “I do.” He made a horrible face. “My God, that’s rotten.”
A second later the stench hit me. It had a base layer of raw sewage, punctuated with notes of something worse. Much worse. A meaty odor, rancid and thick. My fingers tightened around the hot wire handle of the lantern. We all paused to listen. Albanesi was impressively stoic as he held his own lantern high and aimed its beam down the tunnel.
“I think something’s coming,” John said in a theatrical whisper that was probably audible in the dance hall above us.
He opened the shutter on his lantern all the way and turned to illuminate the passage behind. Nothing moved in either direction, not as far as the next junction at least, where the brick walls gently curved away. But the stench grew worse, making us cough and cover our noses. I detected an odd humming sound that was even more annoying than his squeaky rubber boot.
“Yes,” I hissed, peering into the darkness. “But which way, John?”
We stood near a crossing tunnel and our lantern beams suddenly seemed pitiful, with no ability to penetrate the solid blackness beyond a dozen or so feet. My skin crawled as I imagined something watching from beyond the edge of the light.
“Should we keep moving?” Albanesi whispered through his huge moustache. “Head for the manhole? It seems the sensible thing to do.”
“Just hang on a minute.” That was John, of course. “There’s three of us. Maybe we can bring it in.”
The engineer didn’t look thrilled at this prospect and I couldn’t blame him. But “bringing it in” was, in fact, what we had been specifically tasked with doing, so we retreated a few feet and waited with our backs pressed together, John and I peering into the west-running tunnel, Albanesi watching the east.
The space felt too tight and I reminded myself that at least we could escape up the ladder if necessary. A drop of sweat rolled down my forehead and hung from the tip of my nose, then splashed gently to earth. An eternity passed, the stench growing thicker with each moment. It
was quiet save for the droning hum.
“Flies,” I muttered, fingers clamping on John’s sleeve. “Oh Lord, I think it’s flies.”
He cocked his head. “Maybe the beast is made entirely of insects like that cursed pharaoh from the Sixth Dynasty—”
John broke off as the shaft of light spilling from the open manhole fifty yards down the tunnel wavered and winked out. For a panicky moment, I thought the cover had been replaced, but then I understood that something had passed beneath it, something so large it blotted out the light of the street lamps.
“Madonna santa,” Albanesi muttered softly, crossing himself.
We huddled closer together. I heard loud splashes akin to a floundering animal moving at a rapid rate of speed. It was nearly upon us and it was big.
I wished I had brought my sister Myrtle’s pearl-handled pistol, official orders be damned. Bullets might be ineffectual, but I felt certain it would feel good to wildly fire them into the darkness regardless. What had we been thinking? The sewers belonged to the beast and it was enraged that we had dared to encroach on its territory.
Dust rained down on our heads as something hammered at the bricks.
“Here it comes!” John whispered, unnecessarily.
Every instinct urged me to run in the opposite direction, but as the only woman I wasn’t going to be the first to break ranks — and some perverse part of me craved a glimpse of our quarry after weeks of fruitless hunting.
A moment later it emerged into the beam of Albanesi’s lantern, trailing a tornado of flies. The engineer uttered an inarticulate shout as a mighty limb knocked man and torch aside. I had the quick impression of yes, a mud man, its head brushing the roof of the tunnel, but then glass shattered and kerosene from Albanesi’s lantern spattered on the bricks. A moment later, it caught fire.
I clung to my own lantern as two huge hands grabbed my shirtfront. The mud man lifted me up into the air and I stared at a crude visage with a turnip-shaped nose and mouth clamped in a grim line. There were no eyes to speak of, merely shallow depressions on either side of the face. In the flickering yellow firelight, it seemed a demon from Hell.
