Underground

by Kat Richardson

  “You talk to birds?” he asked as he drew near.

  “Only when they talk to me first.”

  I respect Solis; he’s smart, he’s honest, and he’s tenacious. Everything I really didn’t want to face right then. My only consolation was that the wiry Colombian looked even more miserable in the cold than I felt. I hoped I could use that to my advantage. He grunted in acknowledgment and glanced around me.

  “This is the limb?” he asked, spotting the severed arm by my feet.

  “Yeah.”

  He motioned for one of the men to come forward and deal with the sad scrap of flesh and bone while he started to walk me to the side of the scene. “How did you come to find it?”

  Showtime . . .

  “I was crossing the bridge up there,” I said, pointing up to the street, “and I saw it flung out from under a train.”

  “Why did you come to look at it? Why not keep going?”

  “It was freaky. There was something wrong about the shape, and when I looked harder, I saw what it was. I couldn’t leave it lying there. So I came down.”

  “Have you been standing here the whole time since you called?”

  “Since I called, yes. But I started to go up the tunnel before I realized I shouldn’t. So I came back out and went into the station.”

  “Why did you go into the station?”

  I sighed, feeling uncomfortable and reluctant to stray too far from the facts, but equally unhappy about speaking some of them. “I had to meet my boyfriend—we were supposed to have lunch— but I had to break the date to wait for you guys. He wanted to argue about it and came down here. I didn’t want him to come out and see the arm and freak out, so I went in to him. He left after a couple of minutes and I came back out.”

  I glanced back toward the arm. The man Solis had directed to it was laying markers on the gravel around the severed limb and playing with his camera. I turned my head back to Solis.

  He frowned. “And the arm was just as you’d left it?”

  “Yes. I wanted to check farther up the tunnel, but once the crows came down, I thought I shouldn’t leave.”

  “What is up the tunnel?” Solis asked.

  I snorted. “I have no idea, but the arm has to have come from somewhere nearby or it would be a lot more ripped up by being caught in the train’s wheels for any distance—the tunnel’s about a mile long, so I’d guess the arm got under the train somewhere in that distance. Has anyone from the station reported an injury on the train that came through or any accidents in the tunnel?”

  “I can’t say. Yours was the first report we’ve had.” He raised his head to look toward the opening. Then he glanced around the gravel and tracks nearby, seeming to take a quick survey of the situation.

  The large-sized gravel wouldn’t show any footprints, and it hadn’t developed much of an ice coating to trap fibers and blood on the surface. There wouldn’t be much physical evidence out here. If Solis was going to get anything useful, he’d get it from the hole in the wall or the slab-cold tunnel floor. I doubted he’d find much, and there would be pressure to close the file quickly once they realized the victim wasn’t a taxpayer—unless he turned up as a missing person, which would change everything.

  Solis looked back at me and sighed. “This has been an ill season. Like the weather, it seems people have gone mad. I could wish for less of this kind of thing to go with all the rest.” He shook his head. “You can go, Ms. Blaine. I know where to contact you. Unless there’s anything else you want to say now?”

  I resisted an urge to be flippant and shook my own head. “No. I just want to get inside where it’s warm and thaw out.”

  A little scowl and a flare of orange annoyance prefaced his nod of dismissal. I wasn’t too proud to scurry for the nearest heated room and leave Solis and his minions to the cold work of scouring for evidence. I knew he’d take my hint and go into the tunnel to find the body—he’s thorough and he probably would have done it anyway. I was glad I wouldn’t have to look at it again and see whatever grisly damage the train had added to what was already there.

  This time, I didn’t take the stairs but went through the lobby of King Street Station. Outside, I glanced back toward the tunnel and saw Solis standing at the mouth of the hole bored through the hill. He was talking to one of the train yard men, and their conversation sent ripples of red fear or anger through the layers of the Grey around them. At my distance, I didn’t know which one of them was causing the disturbance. Solis was usually contained and quiet, but I’d seen his bright orange frustration earlier, and this wasn’t the right color. Maybe the yard man was obstructing him, or perhaps it was the yard man who was angry.

  Before I could speculate further, I heard the hoot of a train and saw one of the Sounder commuters edging forward to begin its afternoon run north. It must have been after three, and I realized that Solis might not be able to secure the scene much longer. In the collective mind of the railroad and Sound Transit, I imagined, dead bums took a backseat to middle-class working stiffs at rush hour, and even the SPD doesn’t tangle with the transit system— and its politically powerful management—if they can avoid it. Even cops have to pick their battles at times.

  I turned my back and walked west, squinting into a sudden beam of the early sunset that cut between the buildings. Standing in the cold had made my knee stiff and I found myself limping as I walked the six blocks back to my office.

  I didn’t feel like dodging the first-round drunks on Second, so I walked over to Occidental and went up the broad, car-free boulevard that had once been the heart of Seattle’s vice district. Now it housed quaint galleries and shops and overpriced “pubs” whose “bangers and mash” were actually CasCioppo Brothers Italian sausages with a side of skin-on red potatoes mashed with garlic. The last bastion of Seattle’s original sin on Occidental was Temple Billiards, where lately the coat racks had begun to sprout leather jackets with designer labels more often than those with studs and chains. I was tired, and although it’s not the safest street in Seattle, “Oxy” was one place it was safe to let the Grey come upon me as it would, so I could relax my usual efforts to differentiate the normal from the Grey and just walk.

  Even with gentrification, Occidental Avenue hadn’t changed much physically since the city finally finished the streets and sidewalks in the early 1900s. During some later civic fit of historic preservation, an open park paved with reclaimed white bricks as big and uneven as giant’s teeth had been added at the north end where there once was a parking lot. The rest of the three-block stretch above the stadium had been restored to its original bricked and cobbled plane to match, so I ran no risk of suddenly stumbling into a Grey gap between the old street level and the new. The most dangerous things were the ice-slicked bricks and the possibility of running into someone—Grey or normal—with bad breath and a chip on their shoulder.

  It was getting dark between the rows of historic brick-and-stone buildings, and the quaint three-globe iron streetlamps were powering up to cast oblong pools of light onto the cobbles. Even in the gloom I could see the transparent memory-shape of a statue that had stood in the middle of the mall during the 1990s: a life-size bronze cow with a howling coyote perched on its back. Crowds of ghosts moved up and down the mall, mostly men going in and out of the former saloons, box houses, and brothels. Dim signs advertised various services from assaying to while-you-wait tailoring—though there were an awful lot of those for such a sleazy district, and I had to wonder what exactly was being “altered” in these catchpenny shops.

  I paused by the shadowy cow and watched the ghost of a Klondike-era whore stroll eternally up and down the brick sidewalk. She paid me no attention, nor did most of the other specters: they were no more than recursive whorls of time in the city’s memory of itself.

  Most ghosts are like that, just memory loops or fragments of time, having no will and no volition. It’s the other kinds—the thinking and acting kinds—that cause trouble. Which brought me back to the problem of
the dead guy in the tunnel. There hadn’t been a ghost attending him, no sense of shock, or even a lingering presence of death except in the color of the Grey material that clung to him, and his odor had been a perfectly mortal stench, not magical corruption. I’m no necromancer, so I can’t pick up information about someone’s death from the atmosphere or objects. If they’ve died violently where I’m standing, I may feel shock and pain, but unless there’s a repeating time loop, I can’t get more than that—I don’t know anything. But there’d been nothing to know as well as nothing to feel. It was as if the man had died elsewhere and been carried to the tunnel, or had somehow simply ceased to exist without any shock of death at all and left his body behind, missing one leg. It was confusing and I didn’t like it.

  Maybe it had been his leg found in the construction pit near the football stadium, I mused. That site was just a few blocks south of where I stood near the former bronze cow. But the leg had been found weeks ago and the body hadn’t shown signs of decomposition that I’d noticed—he’d looked like he had been dead a day at most. It was cold now, but it had been warmer and wetter when the leg was found. If it was his leg, there should have been rot whether he’d been dead or alive when he lost it. If the leg wasn’t his, where was his own? And who or what had made that hole in the side of the tunnel?

  I wandered forward, toward the park and my office building beyond it, thinking more than observing. Had he just frozen to death? When was the leg removed? Who was he and how did Quinton come to know him?

  Movement among the shadows drew my attention back to the street. I’d come to the Main Street intersection without noticing. The open space of the park with its two avenues of plane trees lay just across the brickwork road. Clusters of men and women gathered under the square glass shelter on the south end or stood in knots near the totems on the north side, jigging and hugging themselves against the cold. Fires had been started in trash cans, but those wouldn’t last long before the beat cops or the firemen came by. The figures were all bulky and brown in layers of old clothes that no amount of washing would ever make bright again. Even at a distance I recognized a few of them. I saw them around the Square and near my office all the time. Denizens of streets and alleys, some of them drug users, many of them alcoholics, all of them homeless.

  I spotted the old man I’d come to know as “Zip”—I’d returned his prized Zippo cigarette lighter to him back in October when a poltergeist snatched it to fling at me—huddling near the glass picnic house with a crowd of rough-looking younger men. They were passing a paper bag around with small, underhand gestures, sharing the bottle within but still sober enough to attempt discretion. There was the talking man who marched back and forth angrily in front of the killer whale totem, muttering in an incomprehensible language. A huge Native American woman sat at the feet of the giant carving of a female figure nearby and watched him, laughing to herself and shuffling through her bags of collected treasures before returning them to a rattletrap wire cart. A group of anonymous, mouselike people gathered in somber contemplation of their trash fire near the remaining parking lot on the east side of the park, looking as if they’d been outcast even by the outcast. Soon they’d all head for the homeless shelters and missions, hoping for food and a bed for the night. Those who couldn’t get in to the crowded facilities would try to find places out of the cold to sleep until morning, or until a cop rousted them. Thinking of what Quinton had said, I wondered how many of them might not wake up, and I shivered. In a fit of pity and guilt, I dug into my pockets and handed over my change to the first panhandler who asked.

  I noticed other pedestrians avoiding the park altogether, hurrying to warmer, safer places. The presence of poverty and apparent hopelessness frightened them, or maybe they, too, sensed the disturbed and conflicting emotions that roiled in the Grey over the park in combative colors and streamers of cold. Chilled through, I started across Main and through the park, keeping to the middle where the path was the most even and the eddies of Grey tumult thinnest.

  I was almost to the pair of totem poles at the north end—where the talking man was pacing—when something darted out from behind the giant bear totem on my right. It cackled and giggled and I whirled to face it: a hunched figure in clothes so ragged they looked like streamers of matted fur that flowed out from under his long hair and beard.

  “Lady, lady,” the man called out, reaching for me as he darted closer. A Grey stink of sulfur and sewage and a hard, metallic tang like blood and steel swirled around me as he came within clutching distance, creating weirdly twisting vortices in the layers of Grey that blanketed the park.

  I gasped and jumped back with a shock of recognition. This man—this thing—had come running for me before. In an alley nearby, he—it—had asked if I were dead and tried to drag me into the Grey, back when I didn’t know there was such a thing. The last time I’d seen the . . . whatever it was, I thought it was just a drunk in an alley, but now I knew the Grey better and I could see it wasn’t a real man at all—not a ghost but some more corporeal eldritch thing. I reached for a fold in the Grey and yanked it between us, making a shield against the creature.

  Where other things would and had fallen aside, its hand pushed through my shield as if it were no more than mist. I felt its cold fingertip touch my hand. It stopped without apparent momentum and raised its head, breathing a reek of rot into my face. Beneath its dreadlocked mane, the face was now half destroyed, twisted with barely healed scars on the right side that almost hid one terrible emerald eye.

  It stared at me and I stared back, unable to fight it this time as its uncanny gaze held me. It peered at me as if it could see into my soul—if I have one—sighing as though relieved of some pain.

  It drew in a deep breath and said, “Dead enough, lady. Yes.” It moved its filthy hand to my chest and made a patting motion of satisfaction. I felt the touch ripple through my rib cage and down my limbs. Then it laughed and scampered away in its queer, hunched posture, showing a back as recently and horribly scarred as its face.

  I stumbled back and felt the cold bricks slipping under my boots as I started to fall. A quick scramble kept me up inelegantly, and I caught a mouthful of icy air, not realizing I hadn’t breathed during the encounter. I looked around, but there were no other strange creatures lurking nearby to ambush me, and none of the pedestrians hurrying away from the cold nor the homeless people huddling over their fires had paused to stare at the scene. The only person showing me any attention at all was the massive woman under the female totem, and she merely guffawed and waved as if my near pratfall was the funniest thing she’d seen all day. In spite of her merriment, I felt shaken and had to stand still a moment before I could continue the last block to my office.

  The creature hadn’t hurt me—and I had no idea what it had wanted either time we’d met—but I was still unnerved. I couldn’t imagine what its sudden appearance meant, but I was pretty sure I wouldn’t like it when I found out. I tried to put it out of my mind as I climbed the stairs to my office, wincing as my knee complained. Discomfort quickly got the upper hand on speculation, and by the time I sat down to call Will for dinner, I’d pushed the incident aside but not completely out of my thoughts.

  Will answered quickly, but he sounded a bit annoyed.

  “Hi. Am I calling at a bad time?” I asked.

  “Harper. No.” He took an audible breath and mellowed his voice. “I’m down under Alaskan Way at an old friend’s shop. It’s just—” Something crashed, sounding like a load of timber falling on a wooden dock, and a distant voice cursed. Will muttered something away from the phone before returning to our conversation. “I think he’s just broken a vintage phone box. So. Are you free for dinner?”

  “Yes, I am. How ’bout you?”

  “Not only free, but eager to get out of here and meet you.”

  I smiled a little in response. “How ’bout the Bookstore?”

  “I thought you wanted food. . . .”

  “No, silly man. It’s a bar
in the Alexis Hotel lobby at First and Madison. Good pub food, lots of old books on the walls, nice old wood furniture . . .”

  He made a disgusted noise. “I hate places that use books by the yard as ‘interior decoration.’ ”

  “They’re real books and you can take them out and read them—they’ll even let you buy them. Phoebe told me they bought them out from under her at a liquidation sale when one of the other used bookstores went out of business.”

  “Well . . .” he said, still sounding dubious about it. “OK. I guess I can try it. I’ll meet you there in . . . fifteen minutes?”

  “OK,” I agreed, but I found myself frowning as I hung up and started to gather my things together.

  Will and I both liked old things and I’d thought the tiny bar and restaurant full of good old wood furniture and books would be pleasant, but now I wasn’t so sure. I didn’t remember much about the decor of the first place we’d eaten together—I’d been too interested in Will and thankful for not being hit by a car to care about it. It was frustrating to be always just a bit off—had he always been so picky? I didn’t think so. . . . But maybe dining together wasn’t our best skill, considering how often our meals had coincided with various unpleasant events.

  Knowing I might not find a better parking space closer to the hotel, I walked down to First and caught a bus. I saw Will going into the restaurant as I got off at Madison.

  Inside, I found Will seated at a small wooden table in a nook near the back—where the heat was. Even with double glazing, the tables near the large front windows were too cold to sit next to. Will grinned at me and I smiled back on the sudden surge of remembered giddiness I’d felt when we first met. It was a sweet, warm feeling I wanted to hold on to a little longer. I shucked off my extra layers and sat down across from him as the waiter handed us menus and left us alone.