Inside the Shadow City

by Kirsten Miller

  “What happened?” I heard someone ask.

  “They were locked inside to die,” I muttered to myself.

  “Someone murdered them?” whispered Betty.

  “No, I don’t think so. Not so many at once. They must have died from a plague. I think they were locked in this room so they couldn’t spread the disease.”

  Luz made a dash for the exit.

  “Don’t worry,” DeeDee assured her. “There’s no danger now. Whatever killed them would have died with them.”

  “There was a plague in New York?” asked Oona.

  “Sure, lots of them,” I replied. “Cholera, smallpox, yellow fever. You hardly hear about them anymore, but they killed thousands of people in New York. All of the parks downtown are crammed with bodies. So many people died, there wasn’t anywhere else to bury them. The whole city is one big graveyard.”

  “So this is why the Shadow City was deserted,” Kiki said thoughtfully.

  “Anyone who escaped would have never come back,” I said. “But it looks like a lot of them never made it out.”

  We closed the door and tried to erase the horrible image from our memories. But no matter how desperately we wanted to forget, the Shadow City wouldn’t allow it. Before our first adventure in the tunnels came to its unexpected and unfortunate end, we came across dozens of doors with the same red cross. We chose not to open them, but instead passed silently by. There was no point in disturbing the dead to check for exits. After all, the rooms had been chosen because there was no way out.

  • • •

  The discovery of the plague that had swept through the Shadow City left us all feeling homesick for the world above. Though Kiki kept pushing us forward, none of us had much heart left for adventure. Fortunately, we had to summon the courage to face only one more locked door that first night. We found it in a forlorn branch of the Shadow City—a wooden door with the image of a fierce-looking rabbit painted on its exterior. Kiki jiggled the handle. The door wouldn’t open, and there was no lock to pick.

  “Maybe it’s time to go home,” DeeDee offered with a yawn. With the exception of Kiki, we were all exhausted.

  “Not yet. This is important,” Kiki insisted, staring intently at the door. “It’s barricaded from the inside.”

  “So?” asked Oona.

  Kiki didn’t appreciate the challenge. “Don’t be stupid. If it’s barricaded from the inside, it means that the last people in there got out some other way.”

  “Or died in there,” Oona shot back. “Haven’t you seen enough dead people tonight?”

  Sensing that things were about to get ugly, I decided to step in.

  “Look, Oona, there’s no red cross on the door, and if there’s an exit, we need to note it on the map,” I tried to explain, though I, too, would have preferred to start for home.

  “You’ll have to blow the door open,” Kiki instructed DeeDee.

  Happy to have the opportunity to try out her explosives, a reenergized DeeDee reached into her knapsack and carefully took out two small test tubes. The liquid inside one of the tubes was a hot pink not known to nature; the other tube contained a gloopy substance the color of rotten lemons.

  “Stand back,” she told us with evident glee.

  “Wait!” cried Luz in alarm. “We have to check for mains first.”

  Luz and I carefully compared my map of the Shadow City with the NYCMap. According to my calculations, we were beneath Pearl Street just south of Chinatown. The NYCMap showed no dangerous pipes in the vicinity.

  “We’re good to go,” I informed DeeDee, feeling like the hero of an action movie.

  We all stood at a distance while DeeDee uncorked the two test tubes and attached them at their mouths, leaving only a thin layer of paper to separate the two liquids. With remarkable speed and precision, she duct-taped the two vials to the door just below the knob and then sprinted in our direction.

  “The blast shouldn’t be too powerful,” she said when she reached us, panting softly, “but the last thing I need is a splinter the size of a wooden stake. So get ready. As soon as the layer between the two test tubes dissolves, you’re going to hear a big bang.”

  Sure enough, within ten seconds the vials exploded, leaving a cloud of blue smoke and a gaping hole the shape of a shark bite where the lock had once been. Kiki smiled triumphantly as the door swung open.

  Inside were three dark chambers. I had secretly feared that they, too, would be stacked with corpses, but the first room featured little more than a soiled mattress, a couple of chamber pots, and a pair of men’s overalls hanging from a nail in the wall. The second room, however, was in utter disarray. A chair had been smashed against a wall and shards of glass littered the floor. A large black stain coated one of the dingy plaster walls.

  “I’d bet you anything that’s blood,” said Oona, taking a closer look. “If somebody died here, it wasn’t a plague that got him.”

  The final chamber was filled with crates stamped with the word cargo. Kiki reached into the straw packing that lined one of the crates and pulled out a tarnished silver teapot and matching creamer. Another crate held moth-eaten cashmere shawls in every imaginable plaid.

  “Ladies, we’ve found ourselves a thieves’ den,” said Kiki.

  “Look, there’s an exit!” Betty cried, pointing to a ladder on the side of the room that led to an opening in the ceiling.

  “Why don’t you check it out, Ananka?” Kiki casually suggested as she continued to root through crates. “But try to be careful. There’s no telling what’s up there.”

  She could have spared me the warning. The last thing I wanted to do was crawl into a dark space by myself. Unfortunately, I couldn’t decline the offer. Kiki Strike had noticed my nervousness and had decided to test me. So despite my misgivings, I mounted the ladder and climbed through the opening in the ceiling. Surrounded by a circular wall of crumbling earth, I realized I was at the bottom of a deep hole. I counted sixty rungs before the top of my head hit a wooden trapdoor. I took a deep breath and reluctantly raised the trapdoor an inch. Looking through the crack, I saw a spacious, dimly lit room that clearly belonged to the twenty-first century. We had found our first exit to the world above.

  A pale green light issued from a digital display on one wall. Icy air streamed down and froze my nostrils. I listened carefully for any sound of activity. Once I was certain that the room was empty, I raised the trapdoor a bit farther. What I saw delivered such a shock that I nearly tumbled headfirst from the ladder. Hundreds of large animals were suspended from the ceiling, their glossy fur gleaming in the light. Having nearly been consumed by rats earlier in the evening, I was in no mood to come face-to-face with any more members of the animal kingdom.

  “What’d you find?” someone called up from below. The question brought me to my senses. The animals hanging from above were minks, and though I’d read that minks can be surprisingly ferocious, these hadn’t been able to attack anyone for quite some time.

  “It looks like a cold storage room for furs,” I shouted down to the others.

  I climbed into the room, and Kiki followed close behind. Inside, it was the dead of winter, and though I stood shivering in the cold, Kiki showed no sign of discomfort. She marched around the perimeter of the room, examining the merchandise.

  “Verushka has a picture of my mother wearing a coat just like this,” Kiki said as she lifted a gleaming coat off the rack. I was thinking of my own mother’s threadbare overcoat, when alarms began to ring throughout the building.

  “That was dumb,” Kiki said, showing no trace of panic. Spying my terrified expression, she offered a superior smirk.

  “Don’t be such an old lady, Ananka. It’s not like we don’t have an escape route. And I’m sure no one knows about that trapdoor. Look how well disguised it is. We won’t even need to block the entrance.”

  “I think we should go,” I practically pleaded. The police could arrive at any moment.

  “What’s the hurry?” Kiki lingered
longer than she had to before finally placing the mink back on the rack. “Okay, then,” she said as if humoring a whiny child. “If you insist.”

  We climbed down to the thieves’ den to discover Luz rummaging through one of the crates and shoving fistfuls of silver forks into her pockets. Kiki’s sense of humor evaporated, and she reached into Luz’s uniform and pulled out the purloined silverware.

  “What are you doing?” complained Luz. “Where else am I going to get this much silver? Besides, it’s ours.”

  “Yeah, ours, not yours, Luz. Do you have to be so greedy? When we’ve finished the map, you guys can come back for the silver. But if we stop to hunt for treasure in every room, it will take us forever to find all the entrances to the Shadow City. We can’t slow down now.”

  “Oh come on, Kiki, I need some silver for one of my inventions. And I’m just taking a few extra forks for my mom.”

  “I don’t care if you’re making silver bullets to defend the city from werewolves,” said Kiki. “The forks are staying here. It’s time to go home.”

  Luz threw down the silverware she still held in her hand. But as Kiki turned her back, I saw Luz pick up two fish knives and shove them into her pocket. I gave her a smile and decided to say nothing.

  • • •

  By the time we emerged in the Marble Cemetery, it was five o’clock in the morning, and after eight full hours of exploring, we were all dead tired. It took our last bit of strength to restore the marble slab to its proper place over the vault’s entrance. The sun was starting to rise, and as we removed our dirty uniforms, the sky burst into a brilliant orange. We left the cemetery and dragged our exhausted bodies along the deserted streets, lured by the promise of breakfast at Kiki’s house.

  The moment we arrived, Betty collapsed on the couch. The rest of us forced ourselves to stay awake long enough to scarf down the platter of cherry blintzes that Verushka had prepared. As my stomach began to strain against my waistband, I noticed that Kiki’s plate remained empty. Instead, she drank countless cups of milky coffee as Verushka grilled her on the evening’s discoveries. The housekeeper wanted to know everything—how far we had traveled and what we had seen. But like Kiki, she seemed particularly interested in the passages that connected the Shadow City to the world above.

  “The exit you found, Ananka. Where did it lead?” Verushka asked me without warning. I stopped shoveling food long enough to grab my map.

  “A fur storage facility,” I told her.

  “And what was the street?”

  “Pearl Street,” I said.

  Verushka seemed disturbed by my answer. “That is very far away,” she said to no one in particular.

  I turned to Kiki in confusion. “Far away from what?”

  “Far away from the Marble Cemetery,” she answered curtly. “The Shadow City is bigger than we expected, Verushka. Ananka’s going to find the building with the exit this morning. Then we’ll know for sure just how far away we were.”

  Looking dangerously cranky, Kiki leaned back on the couch and sipped her coffee. I took advantage of the lull in conversation to serve myself another blintz.

  “Are you sure you need that?” Oona asked, pointing at my bloated belly.

  I dropped my fork, and it fell onto the serving plate with a loud clang.

  “Nice manners, Oona,” snipped Kiki. “Were you raised by wolves?”

  “What? I’m just trying to help her out,” Oona said, casually licking her fork.

  Before I could say anything in my own defense, Betty jolted out of sleep.

  “What time is it?” she asked, looking panicked and confused.

  “Almost seven,” Luz told her.

  “I’ve got to go!” Betty exclaimed, running for the door. “My parents will be home from work any minute now!”

  Betty’s panic spread like a bad case of head lice. Within minutes, DeeDee and Luz were sharing a cab uptown, and Verushka was on the phone with Luz’s angry mother, apologizing for letting their moth watching run late. Not long afterward, Oona disappeared without any explanation, leaving me alone with Kiki and her housekeeper. I still had at least three hours before my mother and father rolled out of bed, so I borrowed Kiki’s laptop computer—a high-tech model with features I could never afford. As I spread out my notes in the living room and began crafting my map of the Shadow City, I heard Kiki and Verushka whispering furiously in the kitchen.

  Eager to leave them alone to argue, I hurried through my work and set out to find the building with the entrance to the Shadow City. By then, I was so exhausted that I fell asleep in the back of the cab I’d hailed and was rudely awakened by the driver when we reached the address I’d given him. I got out of the car to find myself standing in front of an empty parking lot. My calculations had been off. The map would need to be revised. One block south of the parking lot, I came across an old building with a dry cleaner on its ground floor. The walls of the shop were lined with hundreds of anonymous packages wrapped in plain brown paper, and a neon sign in the window flashed the words Fur Storage.

  Examining the map I had printed out, I hastily sketched a few corrections. Then I took out a large rubber stamp I’d made and a pad of ink. After making sure no one was watching, I stamped a golden i on the sidewalk in front of the building, marking the entrance to the Shadow City with the Irregulars’ logo in case we needed to find it in an emergency. Once I had finished, I used a camera that DeeDee lent me to snap several pictures of the building. Finally, almost twelve full hours after I had snuck out of my bedroom window, I started on my way home.

  A middle-aged couple joined me on the corner of Pearl and John streets as I waited for the light to change. I tucked the camera into my pocket and tried to look innocent, but neither of them seemed aware of my presence.

  “Did you hear about the rats?” I heard the woman ask. My stomach flip-flopped.

  “What rats?” replied the man in a bored voice.

  “It was on the news this morning. They said that a ship in the middle of the Hudson River was attacked by thousands of rats last night.”

  “Rats can swim?”

  “Apparently,” said the woman.

  I had to bite my tongue to avoid offering the bit of trivia that sprang to mind. According to The Devil’s Army, rats are champion swimmers. During the plagues that laid waste to old New York, the dead were often buried in mass graves on islands in the East River. Whenever the graves were left unfilled, the city’s rat population would swim across to picnic on the exposed corpses.

  “But what were a bunch of rats doing in the Hudson River?” asked the man.

  “Nobody knows,” the woman answered. “The reporter said they might have been swimming to New Jersey.”

  “That makes sense. New Jersey’s a good place for them.”

  “They said the boat just got in the way.”

  “What happened to it?”

  “Well from what I could gather, the crew abandoned the ship and escaped in life boats.”

  “That bad?” At last he was really intrigued.

  “I guess. The reporter said they ate the crew’s dog.”

  “Rats eat dogs?”

  “They eat anything, don’t they?” said the woman.

  The light changed, and the happy couple strolled off, arm in arm. I reached in my pocket for my Reverse Pied Piper. I had never imagined it could be quite so powerful, and I suddenly felt a little guilty. I wondered how my grandfather would have felt about what we had done. He probably would have packed up his bags and followed the rats to New Jersey.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Big Bang

  My mother’s voice dragged me out of a dream filled with rodents, pirates, and plagues. I opened my eyes and was instantly blinded by a bright beam of sunshine.

  “It’s one o’clock in the afternoon,” my mother announced, reminding me that I had forgotten to lock my bedroom door. As my eyes adjusted to the light, I could see her standing in the doorway with several books tucked under her arm. She had
a pencil stuck behind her ear and another pinning her hair in a loose bun. “Are you planning to spend your summer vacation in bed?”

  “I was up late reading,” I informed her, knowing she’d approve. “I’ve been studying the history of New York City.”

  “Oh, Ananka, how wonderful!” my mother gushed. I doubt she had been so excited since the day I was potty trained. “I’ve dabbled a little in that subject myself. The Revolutionary period is particularly fascinating, don’t you think?” She looked over at the pile of books and papers on my desk. Sitting on top was my map of the Shadow City. “What’s this?” she asked, bending down for a closer look. “Is it part of your research?”

  I considered lying until I realized that nothing would be harder for my mother to believe than the truth.

  “It’s a map,” I told her, sitting up in bed. “There’s an underground city beneath downtown Manhattan. Only six people know about it, and I’m one of them.”

  My mother looked crestfallen. “You’re twelve years old, right?” she asked in the same sad voice she used whenever I brought home a report card filled with C’s.

  “Twelve and a half,” I reminded her.

  “Well, I don’t know what you’ve been reading, Ananka, but you should know the difference between fiction and nonfiction by now. It’s time to start using your brain for something other than daydreaming. If you’re interested in history, I can give you the right books.”

  “Thanks, Mom, but I’ve already found all the books I need.”

  “Are you sure?” she asked, trying to hide her disappointment. “I’d really love to help.”

  “Positive,” I said.

  My mother shut my bedroom door with a weary sigh, and I smiled to myself. Someday, I thought, I’d tell my parents what their dimwitted daughter had discovered.

  • • •