by Kat Ross
Connor hesitated. Then he nodded once and ran off in the direction of Centre Street. His footfalls faded and all was quiet again.
“We aren’t waiting, are we?” John asked in a resigned voice.
“No, we’re not.”
“Please tell me you brought Myrtle’s pistol.”
I patted my pocket. “Oiled and loaded. I’m not good enough to have tried it while we were chasing him, but up close…”
We looked at each other without speaking. I guessed that neither of us wanted to get within any distance of Brady that could be considered close, but we had to play the hand we’d been dealt.
John pulled the grate free and set it on the grass. We stared into the bottomless darkness. It was like that awful arch in the Ramble had been turned on its side and set straight into the ground. Except smaller. Much smaller. More like the trapdoor under the Bender’s kitchen table. My stomach tightened in dread.
Then John flashed me his old cocky grin. It felt like years since I’d seen it.
“Ladies first!” he said.
Chapter 18
I showed him the butt of the pistol and smiled back, although my mouth was so dry it was more of a grimace.
“No, no, I insist,” I said. “After you.”
John shrugged. “Well, I can’t go in this thing, can I?” he said, pulling the heavy vestments over his head. He wore trousers and a thin nightshirt underneath. “Alright, here goes.”
John sat at the edge of the grate and slowly lowered himself down, until he hung by his fingertips.
“I can’t see anything,” he called to me, his voice muffled as though it was coming from the bottom of a well. “I’m just going to let go.”
“Be careful,” I said, but he was already gone.
I got on my knees and peered into the square hole.
“John! Answer me!”
Silence.
My heart stopped beating.
“John!”
“I’m here,” he called up. “It’s not that far. I’ll help you down.”
I took a breath and shifted so my feet dangled into the grate.
“What’s it like down there?” I asked, trying to postpone the inevitable.
Now that it was actually happening, I could feel a full-blown panic attack brewing. The sudden shortness of breath. The racing pulse. A spreading dimness at the edges of my eyes.
Tunnel vision. How perfect.
I let out an awful laugh and dropped into darkness.
John caught me around the waist and set me gently on the ground.
“You smell nice,” he said.
“Don’t get cheeky,” I answered, knowing he was just trying to distract me. John knew well how claustrophobic I was.
We stood in a space about four feet wide. Enough light filtered in from above to see the many layers of grime coating the walls and floor. John pointed to the only exit—a narrow metal tube that made every cell in my body recoil. It had been covered with a hatch that now lay propped against the wall. He took my hands in his and held them firmly.
“Listen, Harry. It’s not long. I already checked. I can see light at the other end. Maybe twenty feet.”
“Twenty feet,” I echoed tonelessly.
“Twenty feet. That’s the distance from the downstairs parlor to the kitchen at Tenth Street. You’ve walked that a thousand times.”
“Walked,” I said. “Not crawled.”
“You can give me the gun,” he said. “I’m a decent shot. I’ll understand if you can’t do it.”
And he would. John would never hold it against me. But I would know.
That I sent him in there alone.
“No,” I said, steeling myself. “But I think I’d rather go first this time. So I can see the light.”
I kept my eyes fixed on the small circle ahead of me as I eased my head and shoulders into the tube. It was even tighter than I expected. Forget crawling. I’d have to wiggle.
I knew at that moment that I couldn’t go through with it.
I was starting to pull back when some trick of acoustics carried a faint sound through the tube. Not close by, but clearly audible.
It was the whimper of a small boy.
Cold fury surged through my veins, scouring me clean of any other emotion. Leland Brady would not take another innocent. I refused to let him. And if he got Billy…Well that would be on my head, every bit of it. I squeezed my eyes shut and thrust myself into the tube so violently I heard a button pop off my shirt and tinkle on the ground. Once my torso was inside, John helped push my legs in the rest of the way.
Then I started to wiggle.
My breath rasped harshly. How I hated the sound of it. It was too loud, too close.
I didn’t hear Billy again, but then I didn’t hear much except for the blood pounding in my ears and the swish of my clothing sliding along the smooth metal of the tube. I kept waiting for the circle of light to snuff out, for Brady’s leering rictus to take its place. But then I hit the halfway mark. It lit a wavering spark of confidence. I wiggled harder. Fifteen feet, eighteen feet…
When I got within arm’s length of the end, I grabbed the lip and hauled myself out, dropping awkwardly to hands and knees on a tiled floor. John popped out moments later, like a cork from a champagne bottle.
We got to our feet and looked around.
“What is this place?” John said wonderingly.
We stood in a large rectangular room. Thick cobwebs hung from three crystal chandeliers like the cocoons of enormous caterpillars, and a heavy layer of dust coated velvet chairs and marble statuary. Frescoes adorned the walls, their vivid colors undiminished in this sunless space. A dry fountain sat in the middle of the room. Myrtle had said it held goldfish once, to amuse visitors while they waited for the train.
I could see traces of a doorway but it had been bricked up.
“I can’t believe it’s all still here,” I whispered.
“What’s still here?” John demanded. “You’re doing it again, Harry.”
I sighed. “Sorry. Twenty years ago, a man named Alfred Ely Beach got a contract from the city to build pneumatic tubes that would move mail under Broadway.”
“Nooma what?” John asked, as we crept through the room, alert for any sign of movement.
“Pneumatic,” I whispered. “It’s when you use pressurized air to suck something through a vacuum.” Myrtle had explained it to me when she was in one of her talkative moods. My sister would be monosyllabic for weeks on end. Then, like a new weather front blowing in, she’d become full of manic energy and you could hardly shut her up.
“Anyway, instead of two tubes, as he’d shown officials in the blueprints, Mr. Beach secretly built one bigger tube. He spent $350,000 of his own money on it. He was a visionary. He didn’t just want to move letters, you see. He wanted to move people.”
“So what’s down there?” John asked, looking at the far end of the room.
“It’s called the Beach Pneumatic Transit Tunnel. There was a single demonstration car. You paid to ride it to Murray Street and back.”
“What happened?”
“Tweed and his cronies in Albany shut it down. The entrance in the sub-basement of Devlin’s was sealed eight years ago. But this is the station. They left it perfectly intact. And Brady found it. He must have run across the plans somehow through his job.”
“Spooky,” John said, lightly running his fingers across the keys of a grand piano.
“Very. I figure we came in through the ventilation system.”
The light we’d seen was cast by a lantern at the opposite end from the sealed entrance. It had been set there, next to a door leading to a platform. Two bronze effigies of Mercury stood alongside the entrance. A placard bore the words, “Pneumatic / 1870 / Transit.”
We crept to the edge and peered into a round tunnel, perhaps three hundred feet long and eight feet wide, which curved into inky darkness.
“How convenient,” John said, lifting the lantern. Dust motes drift
ed like plankton in its yellow glow.
I cocked the pistol. “He knows we’re here.”
“I’d say that’s a fair assessment,” John agreed. “Do you think he’s armed?”
“Yes.”
“So what’s the plan?”
“I hoped you had one.”
John shut his eyes. “Why do I let you talk me into these things?”
A sob cut through the air. John’s face hardened.
“There’s no time,” he said. “If you see him, just shoot.”
We clasped hands and leapt down to the tracks.
“What’s at the other end of this?” John whispered.
Even the slightest sounds had a way of carrying.
“I’m not entirely sure. There was a carriage. It formed a nearly air-tight seal with the walls. A steam-powered fan would push or pull the carriage along the rails depending on which way you were going.”
The air in the tunnel was warm and dry. We stuck to the left-hand side so we could better see anything coming around the curve but the lantern only illuminated about ten feet ahead. Beyond that lurked a darkness so thick it was like being at the bottom of the sea. It had weight—texture, that darkness. My claustrophobia began creeping back and I nearly shot my own foot off when a rat scampered across it.
“Easy, Harry,” John whispered.
About fifty feet in, we started seeing things on the tunnel walls.
Words, gouged deep into the brick. The same two, over and over.
Pervadunt oculus.
They come through the eyes.
That’s what Brady claimed Straker had told him. But it wasn’t Straker who believed he’d been possessed by demons.
It was Brady.
He’d written it hundreds of times, in letters almost too tiny to read and others several feet high. I imagined him standing with that long knife for hours on end, mindlessly scratching at the tunnel wall like some rabid animal.
But Brady wasn’t an animal. It was an unfair comparison. The thing he’d become was far worse.
John reached into his shirt and pulled out a large gold crucifix on a chain. He seemed to be muttering the Lord’s Prayer under his breath.
I didn’t say anything, but frankly, I was more than happy with Myrtle’s pistol.
We approached the place where the tunnel curved out of sight. John held the lantern low. I knew we were nearing the end of the line.
“He must be waiting in the dark,” John whispered. “So he can see us but we can’t see him.”
He had to be. Ours was the only visible light.
“What’s that?” John said suddenly.
“What’s what?”
“I thought I heard something. Behind us.”
We stood stock still, listening.
“I don’t hear anything,” I said.
“Rats maybe,” John said, but there was a note of doubt in his voice.
“There was no place to hide back there,” I pointed out. “He has to be ahead of us.”
At that moment, Billy screamed, a cry of sheer terror.
Without thinking beyond the next few seconds, I ran forward, tearing around the bend in the tunnel.
“Harry!” John yelled.
The carriage was there. In the dim light, I could see a small figure inside tied up like a hog for slaughter. I smelled something rotten, the sickly sweet odor of spoiled meat. Billy writhed against his bonds, eyes wide with shock. He stared at something over my shoulder.
I spun around. That’s when I saw Brady.
He was clinging to the roof of the tunnel like a lizard. I’d just passed directly beneath him.
John raised the lantern high. I pointed the pistol and fired, but I was panicky and the shot went wild. Shards of brick flew from the tunnel wall.
Brady dropped down, landing on all fours. He grinned at me.
I took a deep breath and steadied myself, using two hands this time like Myrtle had taught me.
Brady sprung.
I aimed the pistol at his forehead and squeezed the trigger.
I missed again. Worse than missed.
The bullet ricocheted off the tracks and hit John in the chest.
That moment is still frozen in my memory like a bug trapped in amber. John crumpling to the ground, a red stain spreading across his shirt. Billy’s screams. My own ears ringing from the deafening retort in the confined tunnel. The weight of the pistol as it was knocked away.
And then Brady’s hot breath on my cheek as he pinned me underneath him and raised his knife.
The edge was pitted and scarred from his scratchings. But it was the point he planned to use.
Some part of me had known all along that we were going to die down here. I only prayed it would be quick, but from the excited light in his eyes, I feared he intended to take his time. He placed the point of the knife against my cheek.
Then I heard the click of a hammer being cocked.
“Don’t move a muscle,” an ice-cold voice whispered in Brady’s ear. “Don’t you even twitch.”
Brady froze.
“Easy does it.” The barrel of a revolver jammed against Brady’s temple, pushing him away.
I coughed and rolled over. I felt unclean where he had touched me. John lay in a pool of blood, his eyes closed. I ran to him and gathered his limp body in my arms.
“Get against the wall,” the voice commanded.
Brady complied. His demeanor had changed dramatically. The Hunter had retreated, leaving the fearful schoolboy in his place.
I pressed a shaking hand to John’s neck and nearly wept in relief. He still had a pulse. I examined the bullet wound. It had lodged in his shoulder. I pressed down, trying to staunch the flow.
“Hang on, Billy!” I called out. “I’ll come for you in a minute.”
It was quiet. Then I heard a hoarse but somewhat calmer boy call back, “Thankth, Mith Pell!”
My savior picked up the lantern from where John had dropped it. He was one of the dandies from the train. I remembered his purple cravat, tied in a looping bow. Then I caught his dark eyes and felt like a perfect fool. It was James Moran. I’d been too focused on Straker to pay them much attention.
“I followed you, Miss Pell. If you’re anything like your sister, I expected you’d be playing a double game.” He aimed the pistol at Brady, cowering just a few feet away. Then he shot Brady in the leg. My former client shrieked. Shards of white bone jutted out of his thigh and my stomach churned.
“It’s too bad we don’t have more time,” Moran said lazily. “I could do this all day. But I think I’d better just put you out of your misery.”
Brady sobbed. I felt no pity for him, not a shred, but this was wrong somehow.
I let go of John and jumped between them. Moran looked up at the ceiling and sighed in annoyance.
“The police are on their way,” I said. “Do you really want to be here when they arrive? He’ll hang for what he did. It’s a worse end in many ways.”
Moran considered this.
“But that’s no fun,” he said at last.
“Then you’ll have to shoot me too.”
Moran regarded me with an unreadable expression. “What makes you think I won’t?”
“Because that’s no fun,” I said.
His lips quirked in an almost-smile.
“I suppose it’s not, at that.” He lowered the gun a fraction. “Tell me something, Miss Pell. How did you know? About the quill? And the piano?”
“Much can be learned about a man from his hands, Mr. Moran. The overlapping stains on your right forefinger, for example. The half-healed welts at your wrist where the strings keep snapping because you apply too much pressure. It’s quite a distinctive injury, if one knows what to look for. Elementary, really.”
Moran gazed at me for a long moment. Then he laughed. “As if one wasn’t bad enough,” he muttered cryptically.
“If you want to do something useful, go cut his bonds,” I said, pointing to Billy.
H
e put the gun away. “I’ll leave that to you. I’ve played the hero enough tonight. It doesn’t really suit me.”
He turned to Brady, who was mumbling to himself. Moran said something too soft for me to hear but Brady shut up immediately. He seemed paralyzed with dread. It occurred to me that on some unpleasant level, Moran and Brady understood each other. They were kindred spirits.
“Fine.” I turned my back on them both and picked up Brady’s knife. Then I used it to free Billy Finn. Nasty bruises marked his wrists and ankles. I guessed he’d had no decent food for days, though Brady had thrown him some rotten scraps. But Billy had served a different purpose than the other victims, and was otherwise unharmed.
By the time I looked back, Moran was gone.
I ran over to check on John. The bleeding had slowed, but he needed a doctor. I could see he was slipping away.
“We have to carry him,” I said to Billy. How we’d ever get John through that horrible tube I hadn’t a clue.
“I thought they were nightmares at first,” Brady whispered from where he lay slumped against the wall. “Just nightmares. But then I realized the truth…after I woke up standing there. I didn’t mean to hurt them.” His pale blue eyes fixed on me. “It’s inside me. Something.” His voice took on a whining tone. “It made me. I sent Elizabeth away. I did that. I did that!”
“He’s barmy,” Billy said, retreating a safe distance away from his captor.
“Yes, he is,” I agreed. “John!” I leaned over my best friend. “Wake up! You have to wake up.”
He moaned.
“That’s it,” I urged. “We’re getting you out of here.”
There was so much blood. We were both covered in it. I looked down the long, dark tunnel, hoping to see the glow of lanterns. But there was nothing.
“He don’t look so good,” Billy said, his poor thin face scrunched up in worry.
Brady turned at the sound of Billy’s voice. His eyes narrowed in a kind of low cunning.
“Come over here, boy,” he whispered. “I have something to show you.”
Billy edged backwards. “Mith Pell?” he said uncertainly.
And then a hollow boom rang out. Puffs of dust showered from the ceiling. Billy shrank against me and I gathered him up in my arms.
It came again and again. A large crack appeared in the brickwork about twenty feet down. I heard faint shouts.