The Company Man

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  “Well. Suit yourself. Anyways, the poor got the short end of the stick. They got the in-between places. They got Dockland. They got the Shanties. They got Lynn. We’re in the nice part of the Shanties now, almost none of it is this presentable. Construct was going to be new living. The rich extending a hand to the poor. Instead they made the world’s biggest graveyard. So the poor stay where they are, stuck in their little neighborhoods, and everyone tries to forget about it.” He sneaked a glance at her. “Newton is far and away the most advanced section of town. It has the elevated train and it has the conduits. You’re living in the twentieth century we were all promised, while the rest of the city’s still fucking medieval. Hope you like it.” He stamped out his cigarette. “Come on. Let’s go see Evans and find out what the word is.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  After they cleared the bodies Collins mustered up a group of men, armed them with rifles, and had them sweep the trolley tunnel, torches wheeling through the dark as they ran. Though the lights faded their shouts somehow remained, echoing through the many atria of the tunnels. Garvey sat on the station bench once they were gone, waiting. Sometimes he got up to examine the trolley car again, especially the door. He touched where it had crumpled in and traced his fingers over the strange cracks in the glass. Each time he would sit back down, chin in his hand.

  A half-hour later a patrolman came down from the street and reported a call from Collins saying they had found no suspects, no assailants, no nothing, and to continue his investigation, this time down into the tunnel. Garvey nodded as he heard the order. It was not unexpected, but that didn’t mean it was welcome.

  They paired him with a trolley maintenance overseer by the name of Nippen, a short, thick man in blackened overalls who seemed entirely too cheerful for such dark work. He ferociously shook Garvey’s hand, ignorant of the grease stains he was leaving on the big detective’s palm, and then gave him a tin hat and hopped down onto the rails. “Come on down, Detective,” he said. “Let’s wander a bit.”

  Garvey, not liking at all the way he said “wander,” put on the hat, lowered himself down onto the rails, and followed him into the dark.

  “They stopped the trolleys, right?” said Garvey as they entered the tunnel. He flicked on his torch and the rails before him lit up like dusky ribbons. “I’d hate if they followed up something like this by crushing my ass.”

  Nippen laughed. “They stopped everything. Our whole system is fucked for a day, for a whole day. No money today, not for anyone.” He laughed again, as if the thought cheered him.

  “Any idea what we should be looking for?” Garvey asked.

  “Not a one,” said Nippen. “You get all kinds of odd stuff down here.”

  “Really? I thought they kept the trolley lines clear.”

  “Oh, no,” said Nippen. “Well, we try. We try to keep the tunnels clear. But shit obeys gravity, and all things eventually want to go down. People. Animals. Garbage. But if anything keeps the tunnels clear, it’s the trolleys themselves. It’s hard to argue with a few tons of iron and steel. They just push it all out, see?”

  “You get people down here?” said Garvey.

  “Oh, sure. The bums love it down here. It’s warm in places. The crazies all seem to come down here, eventually.”

  As they passed under one juncture a deep moaning and squalling filled the tunnels around them. Garvey ducked down and sent his torch beam dancing about. “What the hell is that?” he said.

  Nippen stared up at the tunnel roof, smiling. “I don’t know,” he said thoughtfully.

  “You don’t?”

  “No. You hear a lot of things in the tunnels. There’s a lot of machinery below the city you forget about.” He listened as the squalling tapered off. “That? Oh, I’d say that was probably a pneumatic messenger tube shooting across town. Probably trying to force through a thick spot of mail. Maybe.”

  “It sounded awful big.”

  “It may have been,” Nippen said. “I hear McNaughton has pneumatic tubes the size of people. That they shoot people back and forth through the tubes. That true?”

  “I doubt it,” said Garvey.

  “I thought so,” said Nippen, and laughed. “I thought that story couldn’t be true.”

  “You sure there’s no one down here with us?”

  “Yep. Your lieutenant ran through here just a while ago, guns drawn. He’d have shot anyone, no matter what they were doing. I hear they blew up a rat. Scared one of the cops and then just pow, rat was all over the place. That true?”

  Garvey reluctantly admitted that that rumor, at least, was probably truer than he’d like, and Nippen laughed.

  They continued on. The underground tunnels were a strange, alien place to Garvey. Ribbed metal shafts curved around him like immense tidal waves, sometimes giving way to old, scarred brick crisscrossing over the roof. Passageways of old stone slowly turned into tunnels of shining, alloyed brass. Pipes and tubing would surface along the wall and run for several yards before submerging below the stone. The walls themselves gurgled and chirped and squeaked as unseen things worked for the city above. And all of it stayed down here in the dark, buried here to be forgotten save for those few stragglers like Nippen, or the vagrants who wandered these midnight paths.

  As they walked Nippen showed him the maintenance tunnels and the air shafts and the sewage pipes. They were all means of connecting with the surface, one way or another, though all of these were locked tight. Beside each one was a little tube with an earpiece, which Nippen told Garvey connected them to the maintenance man on duty, whoever that was. “It’s usually no one, unless there’s a scheduled check,” said Nippen.

  “And there’s one on duty today?”

  “Oh, yeah. Everyone’s on duty today. If there’s anyone running around in the tunnels right now, we’ll know.”

  But there was no sign anyone had been in the tunnels at all. The rails were clean, or clean enough, with no signs of disturbance. After nearly thirty minutes of fruitless searching they came to an intersection where another tunnel branched off and sloped up into darkness.

  “Which way?” said Garvey.

  “Let’s see, that trolley that got hijacked, was it the ten thirty-five?”

  “Yeah. And no one ever said it was hijacked.”

  Nippen laughed and ignored him. “If it’s the ten thirty-five, it came through this way,” he said. He flashed his beam on the tunnel to the right.

  “You sure?”

  “Oh, sure enough,” he said gladly.

  “What happens if you’re wrong?”

  “Then we’ll come to some other platform and come out. Most of the time.”

  “Most of the time?”

  “Well, yeah. Some of these older tunnels don’t lead to the trolleys.”

  “They don’t?” asked Garvey.

  “No.”

  “Then where do they go?”

  Nippen shrugged. “Who knows? Listen, this city was built long before we installed the trolley lines. And a city is a big thing, people forget that. There’re opposing forces at work here.”

  “There are what?”

  “Opposing forces. Everything’s got to balance out. You build big buildings and fill them up with people, all piled up on the rock, so to balance that out you have to make a big underground, pushing back, anchoring it. It’s all floating on the surface.”

  “Is it?” said Garvey, giving him a dubious glance.

  “Yeah,” he said. “When McNaughton and Kulahee first made the city, they made it deep. The trolley just fills up the empty spaces, really. The spaces they spared for us. You can tell which ones are the old tunnels, they used red brick when they first made them. You see patches of it here and there. I don’t go in the McNaughton tunnels.”

  “You don’t?”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t want to know what’s down there,” he said simply.

  Garvey stopped. Something white and crumpled was lying beside the
rails. He flashed it with his torch, then walked over to it.

  “What’s that?” asked Nippen.

  “A trash can,” said Garvey, picking it up.

  “A trash can?”

  “Yeah. And it’s been beat to hell. Is it normal to find a trash can here?”

  “On the rails, no. Maybe in the maintenance tunnels or one of the shafts. But not on the rails.” Nippen scratched his chin, leaving a twist of grease below his lip like a goatee. “Not unless someone threw it out the window or something.”

  “Hm,” said Garvey. He tucked it under his arm and continued walking up the rails.

  “That evidence?” said Nippen.

  “Maybe,” said Garvey. “What’s the strangest thing that’s happened in the tunnels?”

  “Oh, hell, I don’t know,” he said. “There’s plenty of stuff me and my colleagues have done that was strange enough.” He laughed hoarsely. “But I hear stories. Real stories. About things Kulahee made and they just stuffed down here, stuff they didn’t want to use or think about.” He stopped smiling. “Once I heard there was a maintenance crew sweeping through here and they heard someone. Someone coming out of the McNaughton tunnels. And they followed the sound, listening to the footsteps. And then they saw him. It was a man, but all white.”

  “White?”

  “Yeah. Like you or me, but totally drained of color. Like it had just been sucked out of him. Even his clothes were white. He turned around and looked at them, his eyes pink as a grapefruit. He’d been picking up cans that had settled in the tunnels. He just looked at them for a while, then he turned around and wandered on, deeper in. They didn’t follow. I wouldn’t have either.”

  He and Garvey walked on for a stretch longer, not speaking. “Still,” said Nippen, “they’re just stories.”

  They kept moving, Garvey examining every maintenance hatch or sewage pipe. They still had not seen a sign of the platform yet. Garvey was surprised. The trolley had taken only four minutes to go from one to the other. It must have been moving at a tremendous speed.

  Suddenly he stopped by one maintenance tunnel, then tilted his head, listening.

  “What?” said Nippen, but Garvey held up a hand to shush him. Garvey unlocked the hatch, then drew his gun. He nodded at Nippen to step back, then flung the hatch open. The maintenance tunnel was low and poorly lit, but they could still catch a flurry of movement as someone scrambled down another passageway. “Stop!” Garvey shouted, and bolted after them with his gun drawn and the trash can still under his arm.

  He swung around the corner, finger not on the trigger but ready to get there, and stopped. A ragged man was sitting on the floor of a small closet before him, trying to pile scraps of paper and refuse over him in an attempt to hide. His face was covered in sores and his hands were no more than bandage-wrapped claws. He kept his face averted and would not look at Garvey.

  Garvey lowered his gun. “Shit,” he said. “Who are you? What are you doing here?”

  The man shook his head.

  “I said, what are you doing here?”

  “Ain’t nothing doing,” mumbled the man. “Ain’t nothing worth doing.”

  “Oh, Christ,” sighed Garvey, and reholstered his gun. “Nippen!”

  Nippen came running up the passageway, breathing heavily. When he swung around and saw the vagrant, he said, “Oh, no. Morty! Morty, guy, you’re not supposed to be here!”

  “Morty?” said Garvey.

  “Yeah, he’s a regular down here. He sneaks down into the maintenance tunnels all the time. We keep telling him to stay out, but he always manages to get in somehow. Morty, come on.” He squatted before the vagrant. “You know you can’t be here.”

  “Ain’t nothing worth doing,” said Morty again. “Ain’t nothing worth doing in the whole wide world.” He kept uselessly shuffling through the papers with his bandaged hands.

  “Here,” said Nippen, taking his arm. “Come on, Morty, get up.”

  “Hold on,” said Garvey. He took out his notebook. “You’ve been in the tunnels? Have you been in here all day?”

  Morty would not answer, still looking away.

  “Were you, Morty?” asked Nippen.

  Morty nodded reluctantly.

  “Did you see anything?” Garvey asked. “Hear anything?”

  “Hear all kinds of things,” said Morty.

  “Like what?”

  “Like trains. And pipes. And machines in the walls. Machines that speak to each other with light. Winking at each other. Blinking songs to one another. And crying. Always crying.”

  “Crying?”

  “Yuh,” said Morty, nodding. “Everything real unhappy down here. Crying.”

  “All right,” said Garvey slowly, waiting.

  “And everything sand,” added Morty.

  “What?”

  “Everything sand. Minutes. Seconds. Tears. Yesterday.”

  “Everything’s sand?”

  He nodded. “We come in. Stumble about. Holding bit of sand to our chest,” he said. One bandage-wrapped hand formed a cup against his breast. “Fall through our fingers all the time, all the time. We don’t even know. We don’t even know. We all dying and we don’t even know. But ain’t nothing last. Ain’t nothing last forever.” Then he peered up into Garvey’s face and said, “Watchman. The watchman way down low, down below the city, he coming. He got his hand clutched on things, too. Not sand. Seeds.” He leaned forward. “You know what they are?”

  “No.”

  “They’re tomorrow. More seconds. More futures. He giving them to us. He coming for us. He tries to tell us but we don’t listen. We can’t.”

  “So you didn’t see anything?” said Garvey. He flipped his notebook shut.

  Morty began rocking back and forth, shaking his head.

  “Nothing at all?”

  Morty stopped rocking and stared at him. “There are islands down here.”

  “Islands?”

  “Yeah. I’ve seen them. Islands, lost in the dark. Islands and buildings made of metal, floating around. All abandoned, lost in the dark in between the walls. They speak to each other. Speak to each other as they float. Flick lights on at each other. I hear it, the lights in my head. But sometimes the watchman makes them say other things.”

  “Does he?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What does he make them say?”

  Morty shook his head. He clasped his knees together and began rocking back and forth again.

  “What does he say, Morty?” asked Nippen.

  Morty said, “I am a messenger, sent from afar. You must listen to me. You must listen.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “I am a messenger, sent from afar. You must listen to me. You must listen.”

  “Jesus,” said Garvey. He turned around and began to walk away.

  “Sorry,” said Nippen after him. “He gets like this.”

  “I am a messenger, sent from afar. You must listen to me. I am a messenger. I am a messenger. I am…”

  Garvey hopped back into the trolley tunnel and smoked a cigarette as he waited. Another guttering moan rolled through the tunnels, tapering off into the sound of distant thudding, which soon faded. He wondered what it was. Perhaps the whole city had shifted above, one block moving centimeters over, almost tectonically. He found it hard to believe he could climb a nearby rung and find the normal world still there. The city and this winding, nocturnal labyrinth could not possibly exist together, separated only by a few feet of stone.

  Nippen eventually climbed out, then picked up the earpiece set in the wall and bellowed into the tube, “Hey, Charlie? Charlie? It’s Jeff here. Listen, Morty’s in maintenance tunnel”-he stopped to check-“AC-1983 again. Yeah, yeah, I know. He almost got shot by a detective just now. No, you don’t, there be a lot of paperwork if we had to get rid of a goddamn body. Yeah. Yeah. Have a good one.” He hung up and returned to Garvey. “Sorry, again,” he said. “Morty’s like that. He comes down here to listen to all the noises. He
thinks he hears voices in them.”

  “Really,” said Garvey.

  “Yeah. But he’s harmless. Just your average street crazy.”

  They began walking down the trolley tunnel again, still waving the torches over the walls and the rails. Soon they saw a string of small, pearly lights far down along the tunnel wall, unmoving. It was disturbing, like seeing only one star in a black night sky.

  “That’s the last platform,” said Nippen. “You can just barely see the lamps. It’s farther away than you think. Some people walk for hours, thinking a platform’s just ahead. It’s like that.”

  With a sinking heart Garvey continued toward the lights. He’d spent nearly two hours in the dusty tunnels and found no more than a trash can and a homeless man, neither of which seemed to carry much importance for his case. It felt like it was his job to catch the murders that couldn’t possibly file.

  “Sometimes I think Morty might not be wrong,” said Nippen at his side.

  “About what?”

  “About the voices. The voices in the tunnels. I mean, sure, it’s just sounds and all, but if you spend enough time down here it does sound like they’re saying something. What, I don’t know. Maybe I’ve just been down here too long,” he said as Garvey climbed up to the platform. He looked off into the tunnels, thinking, then smiled up at Garvey. “Maybe if you spend every day in the tunnels you imagine things.”

  “Maybe,” said Garvey.

  “Is that it for you? You done here?”

  “I sure hope so.” Garvey took off his tin hat and handed it to Nippen. “Thanks,” he said. Then he walked away, smoothing his hair down as he did so, and left the little man leaning up against the platform.

  “You have a good afternoon, Detective,” said Nippen. His voice echoed throughout the empty station.

  “Goodbye, Mr. Nippen,” said Garvey.

  “And good luck with your case!” he called, and laughed.

  It was not until much later in the day that any of Garvey’s efforts were rewarded. He sent the trash can uptown to the Department, vaguely mentioning it might be evidence, and then began walking the blocks near all the previous stations the trolley had stopped at. It was dreary work, and he was not entirely sure what he was looking for. Just seeing if there was something nearby that those people on the trolley had been doing, some indication of who they were and why they’d been there.