Underground

by Kat Richardson

  I felt much colder in that area and got an unpleasant sensation of something crawling on my skin. I edged a little farther into the room, putting my back to the stone wall near the door in the corner, but couldn’t escape from the feeling of dread. The room was fairly boiling with Grey and bright with blazing energy lines in hot yellow and blue, but I couldn’t see an immediate source for my discomfort.

  “We’re now directly under the corner of Yesler and First,” the guide began.

  So this was the “worst corner” in the underground according to the Indians, where a native shaman had driven away a pack of ghosts. Maybe that was an explanation for the energy levels and my disquiet.

  “You’re standing now at the original street level of Seattle. Now, back in the 1860s through 1880s this was all mudflats, and as we told you upstairs, it got a little wet at high tide. So after the fire, the city had a great opportunity to raise the streets up from the tide line and make downtown safe, dry, and sewage free. But raising the streets was a huge undertaking—and undertaking is the right word here because although no one died during the fire, a few people did die in the streets and especially the sidewalks afterward.”

  He pointed up to the modern sidewalk above us. “This was all open for several years while the streets went up. So the people who wanted to get into the buildings to shop or do business would come down a ladder or stair at the end of the block and walk along the sidewalks down here. Unfortunately, they occasionally missed the ladders and fell to their deaths. This was about the same time miners on the way to the Klondike were pouring into Seattle. Heavy merchandise from the shops often ended up stacked on the streets and sometimes a box or barrel would fall into the open sidewalks and kill a pedestrian here below. So you can see it was a real adventure going shopping downtown in those days.”

  He smiled and the tourists smiled back until he continued, “Now, I hope none of you folks are afraid of ghosts, because this corner is reputed to be the most haunted part of the underground we’re going to walk through today. But don’t worry, we’ve never lost a guest. No matter how hard we try.”

  A few of our fellow tourists glanced at each other with shaky bravado and I, of course, didn’t say they’d been shoulders-deep in phantoms since they’d parked their cars.

  As he went on about the bank that had originally occupied the building, I found myself peering around with trepidation, staring more sharply at shapes and shadows than I might have.

  “Now, I’ve never seen it,” the guide continued, “but several of the other tour guides and the crew of a TV show that filmed down here say they’ve seen the ghost of a young man at this corner. He is thought to have been a bank teller who worked in this bank right here. The story goes that he was killed by a miner in a dispute over a . . . lady of negotiable affection.”

  The crowd tittered, but I recoiled as something that was definitely not a young man dead or alive loomed up in the icy cold, malforming the lines of energy that strung through the space like a net.

  “Bitch,” someone whispered in the silvered gloom of the Grey. I looked for the speaker but could only spot a moving columnar disturbance in the thin mist and bright lines. Whoever or whatever it was didn’t have enough power to come any further out of the paranormal, and I was just as glad of that, considering the vicious tone of its voice.

  Unaware of the uncanny member of our group, the tour guide was explaining the glass prisms embedded in the sidewalks above that cast light down into the buried level. As he talked about the manganese that turned the prisms purple over time, I felt the unseen thing halt in front of me, twined in lines of energy like an insect in a carnivorous vine.

  “Don’t interfere with me,” it murmured.

  Startled, I jerked back. “What?” I hadn’t expected something so barely present to be aware of me, much less so angry.

  “Meddler, busybody . . .” the thing whispered. The lines flared as it surged toward me, and fell back, restrained by whatever spell those strands of elemental energy wove. I racked my brain. I knew what this thing was if I could just recall. . . .

  “Do I know you?” I asked. The woman on one side of me glanced my way then back to the tour guide when she realized I wasn’t talking to her. Quinton touched his hand to mine but didn’t make a bigger move—he knew I faced something he couldn’t see or hurt.

  “No,” the whisper replied—I could hardly think of it as more— and the connection was made. It was a discarnate revenant. I’d met a manifest revenant before and not enjoyed the experience, but never a discarnate. Powerful in life and aware in death but entirely incorporeal, they were generally angry, frustrated, and malevolent. They’re the things that whisper madness and suicide into the ears of the receptive and depressed. A shred of some powerful thing that had died or been exorcised incompletely, this one must have been the remains of something the native medicine man had tried to remove but could only weaken enough to bind it to this place. Nasty bits of psychic personality, all revenants were aware of everything around them, even if they couldn’t affect it, and that made for a vicious and tricky ghost. Since this one knew who I was, it probably knew what I was looking for.

  I edged away from my corporeal neighbors and muttered, “Tell you what, I’ll leave you alone if you tell me where to find the Sistu.”

  I felt it laugh more than heard it. “Find death where there is no light, no comfort, between the tides, in a pool that is not a pool.” It laughed again and faded away, letting the energy of the Indian’s magic slide back into its warding shape.

  Well, I thought, it had been worth a try. And at least the nasty thing was gone, I added with a shudder. Whatever it had been in life, it was one unpleasant customer in the afterlife. The unsettling feeling of the room eased when the invisible creature left.

  Quinton shot me a questioning glance and wrapped my hand in his but I shook my head and mouthed, “Later.”

  Our guide was asking for questions and almost ready to move on. I put my hand in the air.

  “Yes. The lady in the back,” he acknowledged, pointing at me from his height over the heads of the tourists.

  I put my hand down. “You mentioned the ghost of the bank teller. Are there other ghosts associated with this corner?”

  “Well, not anymore,” he replied, “although there are reportedly other ghosts in the underground. A lot of tour guests used to report seeing or hearing the ghosts of Native Americans here.

  It was so disturbing and frequent that a shaman was called in around . . . 1997, if I remember correctly, to clear the place and send the ghosts away. It must have worked, because it’s been pretty quiet since then.”

  The old man we’d talked to Saturday night had been right about the ghosts, but wrong about the dates. I wondered what the Indian ghosts had been doing down here, since Fish had said that the living and the dead didn’t mix. What would have made them linger and why had they associated with the revenant? Did they have anything to do with the Sistu—if that was the monster we were chasing—or with putting it back in its box in the past?

  As I’d been thinking, the group had begun to troop out and go on around the corner into the bank vault. Quinton and I trailed them but saw no other lingering shades as we rejoined the tour group and climbed some stairs to exit into the ragged end of Post Street.

  We listened to more patter about the underground and followed our guide to cross First again and trailed up the street to enter a narrow building at 115 Yesler. Except it wasn’t a building, really, but a door between buildings that held staircases going up and down. Down led again into the underground. This time we emerged inside a building—a former store showroom with a crazily sloping floor. The cement was warped, tipped, and pitched until it looked like a model mountain range.

  The guide explained that the delicately stenciled plaster walls in the room led them to believe the shop had once been quite elegant. “At one time this building would have had a polished wood floor, but it’s now concealed by this concrete you see. All t
his concrete throughout the underground was poured in at the city’s insistence when plague broke out here in 1907.” The crowd made an uncomfortable rustling as he went on. “They thought that sealing the wooden floors and sidewalks would stop the rats and their friends from coming up through the foundations, but they didn’t think about the fact that all these buildings rest on oiled cedar pilings driven into the mud and landfill beneath, and that landfill is unstable.” Unstable enough, I thought, to bring down buildings—and trap monsters? “Most of these buildings are currently sinking at a rate of a quarter of an inch a year and have been for some time. That settling accounts for most of the uneven floors, tilted doorways, and strange noises you may encounter as we continue the tour.”

  Well, that and the ghosts, I thought.

  He talked a bit more about the room we were in, saying that it had been in a couple of films, including the original Night Strangler movie—a vampire story set in Seattle’s underground—that had come from the TV series The Night Stalker that I thought I might have seen as a kid, but couldn’t remember.

  At last we’d exhausted the exhibits in the old shop and went out. We followed the guide past the shop’s original window-filled frontage and around the corner of Occidental to a dark area of red-bricked arcades and deep terra-cotta walls. A few work lights in cages hung at random intervals to cast deep shadows into the mist-heavy corners. Once again the throngs of ghosts were thick—even thicker down in the underground than they’d been on the surface.

  “Now we’re under Occidental Avenue, but when this was originally built, it was called Second—notice the sign up there. Once the sidewalks were completed, people still used the underground sidewalks as a sort of covered mall to avoid the rain, and the doors on the old street level remained open until the underground was officially closed in 1910 due to a second outbreak of plague. But despite that, much of the underground never really closed at all; it just became the underworld. This stretch of Second, from where we are now to about where Qwest Field stands today, was the most crime-ridden, vice-filled, and profitable part of the whole city.

  “Along this stretch there were several hundred women who listed their occupation as ‘seamstress’ and yet not a single one of them owned a sewing machine. For many years, Seattle’s ‘seamstress’ tax paid for the fire brigades, police, streets, and schools the more upright members of society demanded without ever having to legalize Seattle’s most lucrative trade—prostitution.”

  I suppose I should have been appalled, but after having seen their ghosts—both the adult women on the street and the sad girls in the alley cribs—I wasn’t so much outraged as sad to hear my worst imaginings confirmed.

  I missed something of the tour patter while I thought of those ghosts and only heard the guide say, “Once the sidewalks were installed, most of Seattle’s vice, drugs, and gambling sank to the underground levels in spite of the official closure of the underground and was still in full swing when Prohibition hit and gave the old place an infusion of new blood—highly alcoholic blood—and crime. Prostitution ceased to be our most profitable underground business in favor of bootlegging.

  “Now, let’s move a little farther along here. . . .”

  As we walked down the vaulted corridor, the space was raucous to my ears—filled as it was layers of time and packs of ghosts. We paused in front of a building labeled “107 Saloon” as the guide described later efforts to preserve the underground with earthquake-proof structures and shoring up the walls that were already up to six feet thick in some places. I thought any monster that could go make a hole in the four-foot-thick walls of the Great Northern Tunnel wasn’t going to be much deterred by the stone and brick of the underground’s street buttresses, no matter how thick. I listened with only half an ear to the tales of the city’s halfhearted efforts to clean up the vice and crime in the underground—somewhat hampered by the involvement of police and politicians in the money-making end of the enterprises—while I looked around the section of sidewalk for possible phantom informants. The darkness inside the shell of the 107 Saloon wasn’t dark to me—the space was thronged with a party crowd of speakeasy patrons whooping it up among the thinner ghosts of the Klondike’s miners and lumberjacks. I glanced in at them and was struck by the sight of a familiar face.

  Among the crowd of illegal drinkers, I spotted Albert—the ghost who inhabited the home of my friends Ben and Mara Danziger. For a moment, I tried to catch his attention, but I soon realized I was seeing a mere loop of history—a bit of the old building’s memory of its past. I watched Albert with narrowed eyes and recognized the quick twist of his head and the gleam on his spectacles from a far more recent encounter. I ground the feeling of unpleasant familiarity through my mind until the image and idea clicked together. He was the second spirit that had been riding the zombie I’d released under the viaduct. Damn Albert! What was the bastard up to? I’d have to find out. I didn’t like the idea that the unpredictable specter might be involved in the deaths of undergrounders. It might not be true, but I still needed to know.

  I barely managed not to fall on the uneven slope of the floor as the guide led us out and up to the alley behind the Merchants Cafe. My knee made a popping sound as I stumbled to keep my footing. I’d need to ice it and do an extra set of stretches to keep it supple after this.

  From the alley we could see down to Occidental Park—right to the lot where the Kline and Rosenberg building must have fallen.

  Our guide continued his speech. “During World War Two, the military used the underground, but once the war was over, it was abandoned once again. From 1946 to 1952, the underground became a dumping ground for trash and broken furniture as well as a scavenger’s delight for antique collectors who stole most of the period bits and pieces including the doors right off the buildings. Without the doors, the underground became a highway for burglars, and most of the businesses in Pioneer Square were hit at one time or another by enterprising thieves who came up from the unprotected basements. It also became a haven for the homeless and several fires were started by transients trying to stay warm. In 1952, the underground was officially condemned and closed—supposedly for good,” he said.

  He pointed down the alley to the park. “Normally, I’d take you down to the park for a look at the totem statues of sun and raven, the bear, orca, and Tsonoqua—the ogress called “nightmare bringer”—but it’s pretty cold and dark today. They are very interesting sculptures, however, and I urge you to come back when the light and weather are better. Now, follow me across the street and we’ll wrap this up under the Pioneer Building.”

  As we crossed the street he told us we’d be going down one of the few original staircases still intact. “Most of these were removed in 1952 when the underground was sealed, but this one was preserved under its cover. When the lower levels of this building were reopened for business, the staircase was restored for our use. The original staircases had no rails, so try to imagine, as you descend, what it was like to use these steep, open stairs every day.” We followed him down the stair and I shivered at the thought of taking those slippery steps without a handrail. Especially if I’d been drinking like a miner or a lumberjack. No wonder people missed them and became “inadvertent suicides.”

  We entered the final room of the tour, filled with strange objects that had been found in the underground. The guide pointed out a tin bathtub that had been found inside one of the walls—suspected of being used to brew up literal bathtub gin—and a bored out cedar log from the water system. There was also an early glass plate photo of a Madam Lou Graham and her “sewing circle” with a note attached that said Madam Lou’s brothel—where the photo was taken—had been housed at First and Main, probably in the building that was currently the Bread of Life Mission. Quinton and I both smothered chuckles over it. Finally, the group moved on and followed our guide into the gift shop, where Quinton and I cornered him at the cash counter.

  His name was Rick and he was the tour’s historian. I introduced myself
and said that we were doing some research into myths and legends of the underground.

  “Well, I covered a lot of the more interesting ones on the tour,” Rick said, “but, of course, there’s more than a ninety-minute tour has time for. Some things don’t play too well, so we don’t use them on the tour, and others aren’t exactly family fare. We make light of the vice and crime, but it was pretty rank. For instance, the age of consent was ten and not a few Klondikers disappeared and never showed up again. It’s really safer to talk about toilets, rats, and political corruption in pursuit of the almighty dollar.”

  No doubt, but sewage wasn’t my topic of interest. “We’re specifically looking for anything about Indian activity in the underground, any legends about monsters or ghosts that were banished from the area and when those might have occurred.”

  Rick shook his head. “Aside from the story I told you about the shaman, I don’t know much about that. The local Indians haven’t had much pull with the city historically, so if they wanted to do anything or thought there was something going on, they were pretty much ignored until the eighties or later. Even the totems in Occidental Park were a pretty late sop to the native population.”

  “Was there any activity after the earthquake of 1949?” I asked.

  Rick thought a moment, narrowing his eyes so the wandering one seemed to vanish. “Hmm . . . I think there might have been some kind of ceremony by the local Indians then, but I’m not sure. There was a lot in the papers of the time about the buildings that had been damaged and the repair or destruction of them, but the local natives didn’t rate that kind of coverage. Some interesting artifacts were found in the mess, since it was the first time some of that ground had been excavated since the fire. I think they pulled up some of the original wooden sewer pipes then and found a lot of objects in the street fill, since the city dumped anything it could get into the streets to raise them—including dead animals and broken furniture. Most of it was just thrown into a different dump, afterward. People weren’t very interested in the historical value of things dug out of the street then, and the local tribes hadn’t yet convinced the state to treat Indian artifacts as important. If the Indians did some kind of ceremony to placate earth spirits or ancestors, you’d get a lot more information by talking to them.”