by Hilary Duff
My breath caught in my throat.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we welcome you to Cincinnati, Ohio,” the flight attendant said over the intercom. The lights flicked back on and the shadows flew from Ben’s face.
“I’m sure,” I said. “I’m fine.”
“Okay, good.”
We stayed quiet as the plane taxied to the gate, and prepared to get off. The silence gave me time to think about what I’d seen. It was real—as real as what I’d seen with Petra—and I was sure Sage had seen the exact same thing. He’d been there . . . wherever we were . . . just as I’d been. And yet . . . he didn’t seem familiar with Amelia the way I was. So it was definite—Amelia, Petra, and the two men weren’t related to Sage in any way, nor were they anyone he knew.
So who were they? And why had they come to me? And why did Amelia bring Sage and me together, when the rest of her family wanted me to forget about him? I felt like she’d tried to explain it, but what she’d said didn’t make any sense to me. Maybe Ben could help me figure it out, but I worried about him. I didn’t think he’d do anything on purpose to get between Sage and me, but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t happen. I decided to keep my mouth shut.
I gasped out loud when I realized I’d missed an opportunity. I had just seen Sage. I could have asked him where he was and the best way to get to him. I told myself I would have if I’d had more time; I was just so overwhelmed to finally be with him, to touch him and feel his arms around me, there was no way I could think strategically. It was a lost opportunity, though, and I was furious. I couldn’t let that happen again.
Ben and I had made it off the plane and were walking through the terminal. It was late. The place felt half-abandoned.
“So,” I began, “you said there’re two miles of abandoned subway.”
“Right.”
“Then how do we know the right place to try to get in? What if we burst into the middle of one of their training exercises? We could get killed before they even know who we are.”
“Ghost stories,” Ben said.
“‘Ghost stories’?”
“That’s today’s mythology: ghost stories.”
“I thought you believed in ghost stories. Now you’re saying they’re myths?”
“I believe in the inexplicable, things beyond what most of us know and understand.”
“Aren’t ghost stories about the inexplicable?” I asked.
“Usually it’s the opposite,” Ben said. “Ghost stories are about something easily explicable . . . but the person telling the story doesn’t realize it. Ghost stories start because people experience something they don’t understand, and come up with a story to explain it. It’s just like ancient Greeks who watched the sun move across the sky and decided it was being pulled by a giant chariot.”
“Okay . . . but what does that have to do with finding the CV?”
“I did some research while you were sleeping. The Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra Music Hall has been around for more than a hundred years, so it has a history of ghost stories. Most of them are what you’d expect: phantom music everyone says was played by a star violinist who committed suicide on the symphony’s opening day; ghostly sightings of their most famous conductor, dead but hoping to lead his orchestra one last time.”
“Sounds like your kind of place.”
Ben flashed a smile. “I’ll admit I’m intrigued. But what’s more interesting is that for the past ten years, the ghost stories have changed. They’re about noises coming from underground. There’re whole websites now about how the Music Hall was built over an ancient cemetery, and the ghosts of displaced bodies are out for revenge.”
We were in baggage claim now, and Ben beelined for a small kiosk with a picture of a taxi above it.
“So tell me,” I said, smiling because I was sure I knew the answer, “is the Music Hall actually built on top of an ancient cemetery . . . or on top of an ancient subway?”
“The largest of the underground stations is Race Street, a few blocks away from the Music Hall. All the ghost stories I found were centered around that area; none of the stories had anything to do with the other end of the subway.”
“Because the CV is operating underneath the Music Hall.”
“Around there, yeah,” Ben agreed.
We had made it to the front of the taxi line. “Twenty-three twenty-two Ferguson Road in Cincinnati, please.”
“Out these doors, cab three-oh-nine.”
I followed Ben outside and into the cab.
“So here’s what I think we should do,” I whispered. The cabdriver blared music in a language I didn’t know, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t be intrigued by our conversation. “We find a way to sneak into the subway as far from Race Street as possible.”
“I agree,” Ben said. “Based on the noises, that’s where we’re least likely to be caught.”
I didn’t ask what would happen if we were caught. The CV weren’t exactly reasonable people. If we were caught, we’d just have to scramble to make sure we stayed alive, found Sage if he was there—and if not, found whatever Sage needed us to find—and got back out again.
“So where is the cab taking us?” I asked. “Did you find an entrance?”
“I did, but that’s not where we’re going. We need to make one more stop to prepare.”
Several minutes later, the cab came to a stop in front of a giant box with a blue-and-white sign. We’d pulled into Walmart.
Ben leaned forward and handed the driver some cash. “We’ll be back as soon as we can. Please wait here.”
We passed through the automatic glass doors and into fluorescent light so harsh I wished I’d worn my sunglasses.
“Good evening,” said a white-haired woman in a blue vest covered with smiley-face pins. “Welcome to Walmart!”
Ben sped past her and I walked quickly to keep up, but the woman was undaunted. “Please be aware we’re closing in just ten minutes,” she shouted after us, “so if there’s anything I can do to help speedy-up your shopping trip, you just let me know, okay?”
“Thank you!” I called back.
Ben wound his way through the store, picking up flashlights, trowels, batteries, backpacks, wire cutters, rope, heavy gloves, thick sweatshirts, surgical face masks, a compass, energy bars, serrated folding utility knives . . . and a parade of middle-aged to ancient blue-vested people who I at first thought might be alarmed that our shopping cart looked like it belonged to John Dillinger but were apparently far more worried about rousting us from the store before closing time.
“Four minutes!” a heavyset man chirped, his smile straining his face even more than the “How May I Help You” vest strained his ample stomach.
Ben ignored him.
“Do you think we have enough knives?” Ben asked.
“How many knives do you think we need?”
“I don’t know. . . . What do you think of this one?”
“Ben, that’s a machete.”
He just looked at me.
“Put it back,” I said.
He did but kept scanning the blades. “This one has a gut hook,” he said.
“Two minutes left!” a new blue-vester cried as she joined us. “May I help you to the checkout?”
“Yes!” I said, dragging Ben by the arm.
“What can you tell me about your gun selection?” he asked the woman.
She frowned a bit, her eyes darting nervously. “We don’t carry firearms here.”
“That’s fine,” I said. “We’ll just check out, please.”
The woman nodded and walked quickly toward the registers.
“What do you think you’d do with a gun?” I hissed to Ben.
“It’s the CV. I just want to be prepared.”
“What happened the last time you shot a gun?”
He’d done it once, and I’d been there. He’d been with me on a photojournalism assignment where I’d sat in with a female police officer for a week, and she’d taken us to a shooting range.
“That was different,” Ben said.
“You broke your collarbone!”
The heavyset blue-vester chuckled. When I turned to him, he covered it up by coughing into his fist. Ben’s face reddened and his mouth became a line.
“Very nice, Clea.”
He went ahead to the checkout counter and wouldn’t look at me as our purchases were rung up and bagged.
“So long!” called the heavyset man as we left. He pointed his finger and thumb at us and “shot” a farewell, then cried “Ow!” as he recoiled his own hand into his shoulder.
He was not helping.
We climbed back into the cab, and Ben gave him another address.
“Is that near the entrance we want?” I asked as we pulled away.
Ben didn’t answer.
“Oh come on, Ben. They didn’t even sell guns anyway. Let it go.”
“You always underestimate me, Clea. You’re the one who came to me, remember? So if you want me to help, how about you trust me to help?”
“I do trust you, Ben.”
He glared at me. I had to be honest.
“I trust your intentions.”
Ben didn’t answer. He spent the rest of the cab ride unpacking our purchases and tucking them into our new backpacks. He put on one sweatshirt and handed the other to me. The knife he folded into its protective sheath, which he hung from his belt. Then he handed me mine so I could do the same. He filled the flashlights with batteries and clicked them on to make sure they worked, then stashed a couple in each pack, leaving one out for each of us.
“About a mile farther, please,” he told the driver as he slowed. “You can let us out on the side of the road.”
If that raised any kind of red flag for the driver, he didn’t show it. He pulled over exactly where Ben asked, then zipped off into the night once he’d been paid and we were out.
Right away I realized something about Cincinnati: It is not a twenty-four-hour town. It was ten thirty, and around us were nothing but darkened buildings and the occasional passing car.
“This way,” Ben said.
There was a stone fence next to the road, and Ben walked over to it then leaned over it to peer down below. I joined him. Maybe twenty feet below sprawled a sea of gravel and scrub, separated by a guardrail from what looked like a major road, with a regular stream of cars whizzing by. The web surfing I’d done made me think this was I-75, the major thoroughfare through the city.
“We’re on top of it right now, aren’t we?” I said. “The far end of the subway.”
Ben nodded. “We just have to jump down there, and we should be able to find a way in.”
“It doesn’t look that far,” I said.
Although it did. Especially in the dark, it looked very far. And the road rash from a fall on that gravel would hurt. A lot. We both just stood there, looking down.
Then Ben vaulted over the wall.
twelve
* * *
I DID NOT LIKE THE SOUND of the thud as Ben hit the ground. I strained my eyes to see where he’d landed.
“Ben? Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. Make sure you wear your gloves.”
I pulled the gloves out of my backpack and pulled them on, then climbed over the stone fence, throwing my legs over the top and hanging down so the actual drop would be as short as possible.
I let go and fell for a very long second before the ground smacked into me. I did land on my feet, but I couldn’t stay on them, and toppled backward onto the gravelly pavement.
“Here,” Ben said, holding out his arm. “You’ll want to grab my wrist.”
“Your wrist?”
Then I noticed the heel and palm of his hand were covered in scratches.
“Ow! Ben, are you okay?”
“I’m fine. I just should have thought of the glove thing before I jumped. Come on.”
I grabbed his wrist and he helped pull me to my feet, then I checked out his other hand, which was just as scraped up. “This needs to be cleaned out. That’s what we should have been looking for—not a gun, a first-aid kit.”
Ben whipped back his hands and walked away from me. I sighed and followed him.
Up ahead, the stone wall over which we had vaulted protruded into our path, and on the wall facing us rose a massive archway.
The entrance to the subway.
It was maybe fifteen feet tall and ten feet wide, the top four feet filling the curve of the arch with a rusted lattice of steel. In the long-ago subway planners’ eyes, the area below the lattice would be wide open, the right side crammed with commuters climbing down to the train cars, the left spilling people out at their destination. Looking around now, I couldn’t imagine this area as the same kind of urban hub as New York’s subway stations, but it had been about a hundred years since it was built, so things must have been much different then. In a way, it was like I was looking at a portal into that past world.
A closed portal. The entire area beneath the steel lattice was welded shut with a thick metal wall, covered by a layer of steel jail-cell-like bars. To top it off, the brush grew thick and deep around the bottom third of the wall, reaching up as high as my waist. It was as if Nature herself wanted this entrance to remain permanently sealed.
“There’s no way we can get inside,” I said.
“You think?” Ben asked.
He tromped into the brush, but made it just a few feet before he was hopelessly tangled. He swung the backpack off and pulled out his gloves, then unsheathed his knife and started sawing through the more difficult thorny branches.
Ben was right. We had to try.
I unsheathed my knife and started hacking and sawing as well. The brambles were thick, and within minutes the muscles in my arms were screaming. I heard Ben’s grunts of breath and knew he was feeling the same thing, but neither of us let up for an instant.
“You know what would really be helpful right now?” Ben huffed between slices of his knife. “A machete.”
“You don’t say.” I gave another knife hack, and made a mental note that when this was over, I’d have to call him on the double standard of him giving me a hard time when I couldn’t do it to him.
Or I could just ignore the double standard entirely.
“You’re the one who knew where we were going,” I said. “If you knew we’d need a machete, you should have said something.”
“I didn’t know. The pictures of this place were ten years old. The plants weren’t like this then.”
We carved paths at opposite sides of the portal, but we reached the door at the same time. By then I was drenched with sweat. I’d have taken off my sweatshirt, but its long sleeves were keeping my arms from getting scratched to shreds.
I reached out and grabbed one of the bars. It was thin but solid. The wire cutters we had wouldn’t come close to doing the job. We needed the Jaws of Life. And even then there was the small matter of the metal wall.
“Ben?”
I didn’t see him anywhere.
Something latched around my ankle.
I screamed.
“Shhh,” Ben’s voice hissed. “Come down here.”
I ducked down and saw him. He had reached through a tangle of branches to grab me. He was about two feet away, but the wall of brambles made the distance seem much farther.
“This way,” he said.
“Move your arm, then.”
He pulled it back and I started hacking at the branches. Ben did the same on his side, and it wasn’t long before I was crouched next to him, in the low, fortlike clearing we’d carved into the brush.
“Look,” he said. Just in front of him, the ground was raised in a low dirt mound, as if something was buried there. Ben grinned, then pulled out his trowel and dug at the mound, kicking back the dirt until he’d revealed a large slab of mold-softened wood.
“Help me.”
The wood slab was buried deep in the dirt, which was far more dense and hard packed than the mound, and it took both of
us digging with our trowels for what seemed like forever before it was loose enough for us to wiggle out.
When we did, we were rewarded by a gaping hole in both the wooden bars and the metal sheet behind it.
A rush of musty air rose up from the subway below. It was like the grave exhaling on us.
The hole wasn’t large. It would be a close fit for me, and a tight squeeze for Ben. With his broader chest and shoulders, Sage wouldn’t be able to make it through. If we did find him inside, we’d have to get him out another way. The edges of the hole were slightly jagged in places. One particularly nasty shard reminded me of the gut hook Ben had been eyeing at Walmart.
I tried to remember if I’d had a tetanus booster in the past ten years.
Ben shone his flashlight into the darkness. “Nothing nefarious. At least not at this end.” He smiled up at me. “Ladies first?”
“How chivalrous.” I grimaced.
I knelt down and shone my own flashlight into the darkness. There was no need to do it—Ben had just told me there was nothing dangerous inside—but I had to see for myself.
The hole sat at the top of a long flight of cement stairs, leading down farther than my light could reach.
Ben and I used our knives to clear away more of the brush, so I’d have room to lie on the ground, stomach down, and ease myself back into the hole, feetfirst. Despite the fact that I’d just seen with my own eyes that the subway was empty, panic surged through me. As I sidled along, keeping the sharp metal edges from catching my clothes and tearing through my skin, every childhood nightmare flashed through my mind. I felt the fur of giant, terrible-clawed monsters swiping at my legs, the hot breath of sewer alligators ready to close their teeth on me and drag me deeper and deeper into the bowels of the earth.
I was grateful when I made it inside and my mind could stop playing tricks on me. I crawled backward down several steps so I’d have room to turn around.
When I did, I was amazed.
I was alone, dwarfed inside an enormous cavern.
I sat on the lowest riser of the top tier of the staircase. Another step and I’d be on a five-foot-long, flat piece of concrete that led to the second tier of stairs. At the bottom, my light gave dim shape to concrete columns stretching floor to ceiling, spaced along a massive platform. I could barely make out the edges of deep trenches on either side of the platform, carved out for train cars that would never arrive.