Gaslamp Gothic Box Set

by Kat Ross

  “Billy,” my client said. Then he grinned and the frozen mask slid away. For the first time, I saw clearly the monster that lurked beneath. “Billy was…delicious.”

  I heard the screech of brakes as Brady leapt onto the tracks. He crouched for a split second, the wind of the train tearing at his blonde hair. In the harsh glare of the headlamps, the man who’d reminded me of an overgrown schoolboy when we first met now looked bestial, like some primitive ancestor of homo sapiens better left extinct.

  Several hundred tons of metal bore down, the wheels sending a shower of sparks into the darkness. I had the brief thought that such an end was fitting, although I was sorry that he would evade punishment for his crimes.

  At the last moment, Brady rolled out of the way, toward the opposite platform.

  We looked at each other, John, Connor and I. The train was still grinding to a stop as we ran to the stairs leading down to the street. Straker seemed to have gotten away, for we didn’t see him or his pursuers in the ornate station waiting room.

  Connor was faster than either of us.

  “Wait!” I cried, as he pelted to the nearest exit.

  We burst out onto Park Row. John and Connor had stopped under the shadow of the elevated.

  “These robes are not made for running,” John panted.

  “Where’d he go?” Connor panted.

  “Over there!” I pointed.

  It was a bizarre sight. Brady dangled by one hand from the track above, about a block down from where we stood. I was sure he’d fall, but then he swung around somehow and grabbed onto one of the latticed steel support columns. He began shimmying down it with shocking speed, like some horrible hairless ape.

  I heard Elizabeth Brady’s cool voice as she sat in my parlor that afternoon.

  “You can just cross him off your list… the window looks down on a sheer drop and our dog has taken to sleeping directly in front of the bedroom door…She’s a husky…”

  The dog that didn’t bark in the night.

  Anne Marlowe was probably enjoying her big scene at the finale of Mathias Sandorf while Brady was scaling down the gutters of their house like a foul spider. Anne’s friend Mary said she was so happy to finally have a speaking part.

  “Harry, come on!” John grabbed my arm and we started running toward Brady. He saw us coming and dropped the last few feet to the street. Then he loped into City Hall Park.

  The path Brady took cut straight between City Hall itself on the left, and the Italianate façade of the Tweed Courthouse on the right. Boss Tweed had embezzled millions of dollars from that construction project, though in a twist of poetic justice ended up on trial in the very building he’d used to enrich himself.

  Brady was fast, but we were faster. I think he’d hurt something in the fall, for he was limping. We started closing in near the far edge of the park. The area was a lively shopping district during the day, but now the streets were deserted.

  We’ve got you, I thought, as Brady veered south toward the post office and was momentarily hidden in the trees. His right foot looked twisted, hitting the ground at an odd angle. There was no way, even charged with adrenaline, that he could run much further.

  We tore around the bend in the path into an open, grassy area bordering Broadway. I expected to find him fallen, or at best crawling.

  Brady had vanished. Quite literally. The storefronts were dark and shuttered. We had a clear view of the park and both sides of the street for several blocks. He was gone.

  Connor skidded to a stop and I nearly knocked him down.

  “It’s impossible,” John muttered. “He wasn’t thirty feet ahead of us!”

  We spun in circles like a bunch of fools.

  “Are you sure he came this way?” I asked, since I’d been lagging behind them both.

  John gave me a level look. “Yes, I’m sure. He must have climbed one of the trees.” John peered up at the high branches with his hands on hips. “There’s no other explanation.” He turned to me with some exasperation. “And you could have told us, by the way. That it was Brady.”

  “I’m sorry, but I couldn’t take the chance that he’d suspect something,” I said. “I had no proof. The only way was to find Straker, and only Brady knew where he was.”

  “And now Brady’s gone,” John pointed out. “So where has that gotten us?”

  I was opening my mouth to argue the point when I felt a faint gust of air. Just a whisper across my bare legs. It was coming from beneath my feet.

  I looked down. I was standing on a rusty grate. Not a large one. Perhaps eighteen inches wide.

  A memory tickled, something Myrtle had told me.

  “What building is that?” I asked, pointing across the street at the corner of Warren and Broadway.

  Connor trotted over and returned moments later.

  “The sign says it’s Devlin’s clothing store,” he said.

  I felt mounting excitement, leavened with a healthy measure of dread as I realized the implications.

  “Brady’s gone under the street.” I moved onto the grass. “And I think he’s cornered. That’s the good news.”

  “What’s the bad news?” John asked.

  “I’m willing to bet Billy Finn’s down there too. Which means he doesn’t have much longer. Minutes maybe.”

  I bent down and examined the grate. The screws had been removed and I could see fresh tool marks.

  “Brady’s been here before. I’d guess he’s been using it as a lair,” I said, as a chill shot down my spine and made its way into my stomach.

  It wasn’t even Brady that scared me the most, although the thought of facing him again—even injured—made me weak. No, it was the idea of going down into the grate. I’ve always had severe claustrophobia. Perhaps as a result of one of Myrtle’s “experiments,” or perhaps I was just born with it.

  But I loathed small spaces. Dark ones were even worse.

  I turned to Connor. “The Tombs aren’t that far from here. I need you to run there as fast as you can and bring as many patrolmen and guards as possible. Tell them a boy’s being held hostage by Mr. Hyde in the old Beach tunnel. That should do it.”

  “But—” he opened his mouth to object.

  “She’s right,” John cut in. “We need help. And you’d beat any of us in a race, hands down.”

  He didn’t say we won’t let you go down there, Connor, because you’re eleven years old and there’s a good chance none of us will come out of that hole alive. John knew that would just make Connor dig his heels in.

  “Go now,” I urged. “We’ll wait here. Hurry!”

  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.

  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 u
nderneath. “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 drifted 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 wal
ls.

  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.