Angeline turned pointedly to Rector and said, “I can’t say for sure, but I have an idea.”
“Ma’am?” Rector asked, guiltily confident that he was being accused of something.
“What you saw, when you first came into the city—you said it was a monster?”
“It was a monster. It chased me. It stalked me,” he said, and it sounded like an echo. He remembered saying it once before, and he shivered, despite his best efforts.
“It was big, and it had long arms,” she reminded him.
“That’s right.” He nodded violently.
Houjin backed him up. “I saw it, too. Whatever was after him, he’s right. It was really big.”
“Let me ask you this,” Angeline proposed to the pair of them. “Do you think it might’ve been covered in hair?”
“Hair?” Rector frowned and cocked his head. “I don’t know … I guess it might’ve been?”
“Long hair. Brown hair, with a little bit of red in it—not half so red as yours, I don’t suppose. But like this…” She pulled a swatch of something stringy and russet colored out of her pocket and held it up to the lantern so the boys could get a gander at it. “I found this nearby. Lots of it, not just this little lock. It’s scattered around the scene. I don’t mind telling you, I took my time here. It’s nasty as can be, but it got me thinking.”
Houjin’s eyes narrowed. “You know what did this, don’t you, Miss Angeline? You don’t know the word inexplicable, but you know what did this.”
“I have an idea, and it’s a strange one—but it’s the only one I’ve got that makes any sense. Come along, boys. I think you’ve seen enough. Let’s go to the Sizemore House and down someplace safer, and then I’ll tell you about my thoughts.”
Fifteen
They skulked together, guided by their lone lantern. They needed it more and more, and Houjin would’ve struck up another if Angeline hadn’t insisted they shouldn’t. Instead, she recommended that the boys take hold of one another’s shirts, and told Houjin to grasp her hair.
“Don’t tug it—I’m trusting you, Huey. But we need to stay close,” she said in her commanding, quiet voice. “And we should use as little light as we can get away with. Night’s falling. We don’t want to fall with it.”
All in a row, Rector feeling immensely undignified, they escaped the last few blocks of the rich men’s houses and ripped-apart rotters. Angeline knew precisely where she was going, and she brought them to the Sizemore House before the sun was altogether gone behind the wall. The house loomed big and dilapidated, empty and waiting. The front porch sagged, and the roof sagged, too. It looked like a balloon without enough air in it.
“Will it fall down on us?” he asked Zeke, because he was staring at the back of Zeke’s head.
“No.”
“Who was Sizemore?” he asked. He liked the sound of their voices; the darkness made him lonely.
“I don’t know,” Zeke told him. “And shush. We’ll be downstairs in a minute.”
By downstairs, Zeke meant the root cellar. Around the back and through a pair of giant wood doors set into the ground, the quartet descended into a space even darker than the one they were leaving—but the tunnels weren’t choked with Blight, they were only tainted with it. The lantern did good work as soon as those doors were shut overhead. The nervous explorers sighed with relief, but they couldn’t take off the masks.
“It looks clear down here,” Rector protested. “I don’t see any gas.”
Angeline smacked him in the back of the head—harder than was strictly necessary to make her point, in Rector’s opinion. “You don’t have to see it to die from it, you silly boy. If I had any polarized glass, I could tell you true if it was safe to breathe. But I don’t.”
“We’ve got some back at the Vaults,” Zeke noted.
“Next time, bring some. I expect that’ll be the next step in the repair process, sending folks down through the tunnels with the lenses, seeing what’s still safe and what’s not safe anymore. After they fix up those cave-ins, I mean.”
Rector almost said, Yaozu will probably add that to his to-do list, but remembered in time not to say the Chinaman’s name.
He caught Zeke and Houjin looking at him, and he shrugged. If they were worried he’d blabber about his employer, they shouldn’t be. Despite the recent smack, he liked the princess in that idle way that required no actual investment on his part. And he also believed the one other thing Yaozu had told him about her: She was useful. Very useful.
“Where are these carts you promised me?” Rector asked, looking around and seeing nothing but the same excavated, unfinished tunnels he’d seen so much of already.
“This way,” Houjin said, lighting his lamp and leading with it.
Angeline looked behind them, glancing at the freshly locked and sealed doors above. It seemed to Rector that she didn’t trust them, as though she wanted to climb up and give them a yank to remind herself they were secure. Instead, she rejoined the small group, this time falling into line behind Rector.
As they walked through the dank, squishy tunnel with its square beam braces, no one talked. It was as if the habit of whispering or staying quiet was sticking with them, even there beneath the city where there were no rotters to lure.
Finally they reached a bend in the tunnel that revealed a set of carts, as promised. Just like the one that had taken them up the hill and under the city, these two were parked off on a short, dead-end side track. Rector said, “Hey, look! We get to ride back home.”
Zeke told him, “Most of the way. And pumping’s easier, going downhill.”
“And we’ve got four of us this time.” He nodded at the princess. “Now it won’t be uneven, side to side.”
Angeline laughed and slapped him on the back. “I think I like you just fine, Red. Half the men in this city would be god-awful horrified at the thought of a woman working alongside ’em, much less a woman of my years. But you didn’t even think twice about it—just assumed I was along for the working. I like that.”
Huey sighed. “He’s not noble. He’s lazy.”
“Lazy, noble, I don’t care. Me and him will sit on this side and crank, and you two younger fellows can take the other. Between us, we’ll be back in the Vaults in no time, won’t we?” She kicked away the nearest cart’s brake block and shoved it along its rails until it reached the main track a few feet away. “Hop on board, boys. Let’s get you home, and get these masks off. Then we can have ourselves a chat.”
When they’d finally reached the Vaults and the big round door had spun and sealed shut behind them, all the masks came off. Everyone stood there panting, feeling the air on their faces. It wasn’t fresh air, and it wasn’t particularly sweet-smelling, but Rector was sure it was the best damn air he’d ever felt, and he’d fight to the death anyone who tried to tell him otherwise. Or at least he’d argue like hell until he felt like stopping.
“Boys, I’ve got a thought.” Miss Angeline told them. “Let’s go the back way down to Chinatown and eat there. I want something hot. None of the men down here have taken to cookery, and I don’t smell anything to suggest Mercy or your momma”—she said with a nod at Zeke—“is downstairs experimenting. I might want some assistance from you tomorrow, so I suppose buying you supper is about the least I can do.”
“Assistance? From us?” Zeke positively pranced at the notion.
Rector didn’t roll his eyes, only because without the mask everyone could see him too clearly. That damn kid, so desperate for approval all the damn time. It was downright embarrassing.
She replied, “Walk with me, and I’ll tell you all about it. But first, we’re stopping by the storeroom and picking up a set of spectacles. I don’t know about you three, but I’m sick to death of wearing that damn mask. Let’s see if we can’t air out our faces a little on the way.”
The storeroom was stacked from floor to ceiling with crates, barrels, boxes, shelves, and drawers. Some were labeled, and Rector picked up the highl
ights even with his limited reading skills. Coffee, gunpowder, socks, leather scraps, single shoes (to be mixed and matched), stray pieces of paper (printed and blank, retrieved from books and book endpapers), maps, fragments of material for patches, copper wire, assorted metal bits (one drawer for lead, one for steel, one for iron), gas masks and filters, a variety of oils and other lubricants for industrial use, hand tools, electrical tools, strips of waxed canvas to repair the great tubes that brought fresh air to the city below the streets …
… and that was only the beginning.
Angeline hunted until she found the cabinet she wanted, from which she retrieved a set of small spectacles. The lenses didn’t match—one was round, one more rectangular—and the frames had clearly been bent together without regard for aesthetics from whatever sturdy wire had been most readily available at the time.
“These’ll do!” she declared, sticking them on her face. She tweaked the bends around her ears and adjusted the fit until they looked like they’d stay on. “It’s funny, looking through ’em. But they’ll tell us where there’s gas, and that’s the important bit. How do I look?”
Zeke laughed, and Houjin gave her a solemn nod that just barely hid a smile.
Rector answered, “Like a million bucks!”
“A million bucks! I don’t have that much, even if I look it. But I’ve got enough to feed us, so let’s head down the back tunnels and see if they’re stable enough to let us breathe like civilized people.”
The lenses in the makeshift spectacles were made from polarized glass, so they cast oddly shaped rainbows around the tunnels when the lantern light hit them just right. Angeline occasionally held her hands out in front of herself, sometimes purely to look at them. She announced, “It sure is strange, how putting glass up to your face makes the whole world look like magic.”
“Like magic? Really?” Zeke asked, visibly restraining himself from asking for a chance to wear them himself.
“The world wobbles a bit, and when I walk, I feel like I’m stepping forward into a big hole.”
Houjin stepped around an eddy of fallen rocks, holding out a lantern to light the way ahead. Somewhere not too far away, machinery hummed to life and the dull, resonant buzz of a mechanical crank rose to a roar. Close behind this noise came a gust of air; it billowed down the tunnel, pulling at tousled hair and unrolled sleeves. It flapped and swelled like the breath of some leviathan deep in the earth’s bowels.
Rector shivered. “Miss Angeline?” He touched her arm.
She stared straight ahead, through the light of Houjin’s lantern and into the darkness beyond, as if she could see the wind itself, and judge it.
After a moment of concentration, she patted his hand and said, “Don’t worry. The glass isn’t showing me anything. This air’s clean.” She gave him a smile big enough to show she was missing one tooth, so far back in her mouth that he hadn’t seen it before. “Of course, it ought to be clean. You hear that sound?”
“Yes, ma’am, I do.”
“That’s the nearest pump room, starting up its engines. Must be coming up on suppertime. You can set your watch by the pumps in Chinatown, and I know because I’ve done it before.”
When they arrived at their subterranean destination, Angeline whipped off her gas-detecting glasses and stuffed them into a pocket. “Here we are, boys. Mind your manners, would you? Can’t have you getting up to any mischief on my watch.”
Rector heard men shouting back and forth, and the regular percussion of hammers augmented with the dragging, scraping whine of saws. At the end of the tunnel a hint of light came in several colors. When they all emerged into an underground street, he saw that the way was strung with lanterns that were shaded with colored paper. A handful of men sat before a storefront that offered bagged rice and samples of unknown herbs for sale, stacked and sorted in the open, glassless window. They looked up curiously at the newcomers, but smiled and nodded to see Angeline, who smiled and nodded back.
Here in Chinatown, the streets were wider and—in Rector’s private opinion—better kept, with proper curbs and wooden sidewalks lifting the walkways off the perpetually dampened dirt. Rather than having one large structure full of apartments like the Vaults, many individual homes were installed between the tiny businesses and in otherwise unsettled spaces. Laundry was strung and cooking fires dotted the thoroughfares with warmth, feeding their smoke and ash up through great metal tubes that disappeared into the ceiling.
“What are those?” Rector asked, pointing like a tourist.
Houjin said, “Vents. They all join up in the level above. Sometimes when you’re topside, you can see the exit pipes smoking like chimneys.”
“Oh. There sure are a lot of people down here,” he observed as another group of men passed them, and a few individuals looked out of windows or stepped into doorways to get a gander at the outsiders.
Zeke smiled and waved like he was leading a parade and everyone there had come out to see him. He told Rector, “There are a lot more Chinamen than Doornails, that’s for sure.”
Huey said, “About four Chinese to every white person.”
“And even fewer of us natives,” Angeline added. “Most of my kin had better sense than to stick around. They’ve gone up north, or out to the islands.”
“Then why’d you stay?” Rector asked.
She was silent for a few seconds. She looked at Zeke and Huey, who clearly knew something about this story that Rector didn’t. Then she said, “This city was named for my father. After he was gone, I stayed here. I was raised by these folks, more than not. We may not look it on the skin, but I consider them family. And I had other family here who died, same as the rest of you lot. I even had a daughter once.”
“Did she die in the gas?”
She cleared her throat. “She died before that. Bad husband, bad marriage. Either he killed her, or he drove her to do it herself. Either way, it was a bad time for me, and for my grandson, too. He was only a tiny boy when his momma passed, so I took him on. His daddy didn’t want him, anyway. So my no-good son-in-law stuck around like nothing had happened.”
Rector frowned. “And no one ever punished him?”
“No, that didn’t happen. He had two things about him what made him more important than my daughter so far as the law was concerned. One, he was a man. Two, he was white. And my daughter wasn’t neither of them things.”
They walked down the Chinatown streets, among men who looked at Rector as if he’d just come visiting from the moon. Angeline ignored the small crowd and curious stares, reached over to Zeke, and ruffled his hair with one gloved hand.
Angeline said, “This boy here, his granddaddy was the sheriff back then. I’m sure you’ve heard of him.”
Rector nodded. “Maynard.”
“Right. I told him what’d happened, and he came out to my daughter’s home one night. We hunted for some kind of proof that Joe had been the one to do her in, but we never turned up nothing between us.” She sighed and stuffed her hands into her pockets. “And I knew Maynard was right. He couldn’t bring charges against Joe just on account of I said he was bad. It was my word against … against everybody’s.”
She paused. “Still, I appreciated the sheriff taking the time. He didn’t have to, and don’t I know it.”
“So … what happened to…”—Rector picked up on the name—“… Joe? Nothing?”
“A couple of years after the Blight, my no-good son-in-law picked a different name and came to live down here. He hired a right-hand man, a Chinese fellow named Yaozu—you must know of him. Yaozu tried to stop me from killing him, but he couldn’t. He stabbed me, though, and left me a bad scar. Between ’em, Joe and Yaozu wreaked a lot of havoc, as Miss Lucy might say.” She finished up fast, then changed the subject. Oh look, there’s Ruby’s,” she said, indicating an open door flanked by two open windows—glassless, like all the rest. From inside the establishment came a rush of steam, bearing with it the odors of unfamiliar food sizzling on a grill.
Rector said, “I thought there weren’t any women in Chinatown. Who’s Ruby?” but no one answered him.
Angeline went to order their food. When she returned, she sat on the bench and leaned forward over the table, her knees splayed and her fingers folded together. “Boys,” she began in a conspiratorial tone, “I want to run something past you, and I don’t want you to spread it around. Understand?”
Huey and Zeke nodded vigorously, but in Rector’s case, it was more tentative. After all, it depended on what she was going to tell them. There was always the chance he’d need to share it with his boss. Unless he didn’t go back to the Station … although he had a good idea that that wasn’t an option. Well. He’d see what he could do about that.
“Good, good. You’re good boys, I’m quite certain,” she said, flicking only a hint of a glance at Rector. “But other people might think it’s a little nuts. And by ‘other people’ I mean the Doornails and the rest of the white folks. Huey, I can’t say about you and yours.” She unfolded her fingers and placed her hands flat on the table before them. “Rector, Huey, I think you saw something that ain’t human. Something that weren’t never human. Something inexplicable, to use the word the Station men are throwing about. A monster, but not a monster.”
Rector said, “I don’t get it.”
She fished around for the right words, and upon finding them, she laid them out carefully.
“Imagine that none of you boys had ever seen a bear before. Now, if I told you there are bigger bears than the ones we got here—up in Alaska they have ’em twice the size of an outhouse—you’d believe me, maybe. Wouldn’t you?”
“Kodiaks!” Houjin exclaimed. “I’ve heard about them.”
“So imagine you didn’t know what a bear was, but you were out in Alaska, looking for gold or some fool adventure. And say a Kodiak popped up out of the woods, stood up on his back feet, and came right for you. If you didn’t know what a bear was beforehand, and if you survived the meeting, you’d run home and tell people you’d seen a monster, wouldn’t you?”
The Inexplicables (Clockwork Century) Page 17