Bad Faith

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  The man suddenly released the grip he had on Knight’s hair and the knife disappeared. “Stand up! Let me look into your eyes,” the stranger demanded.

  Trembling, Knight did as he was told. The man then leaned forward and stared deep into his eyes. He had no idea what the stranger was looking for, but a moment later, the hard stare softened into a kindly look that matched the smile that came to the man’s face. “I do not see evil in you,” the man said, “or I would have had to release you from that body. But you are safe now, brother. I will not harm you.”

  The stranger offered his hand. “I’m David Grale. What’s your name?”

  “Bruce Knight,” he replied, still wondering when he would wake from this new nightmare. But whether he was dreaming or not, he recognized that whatever insanity battled for control in the man’s brain, he spoke the truth. He was safe … at least for the moment. “I was trying to stay warm.”

  “And not doing such a good job of it, brother,” Grale said. “You look hungry. Follow me and we’ll see if we can take care of both.”

  Grale then turned and entered the maintenance door, followed by Knight, who wondered how he’d opened it and from which side. Stepping through the door and watching the other man march off down a dimly lit hallway, he hesitated. Maybe he’s taking me someplace to kill me, he thought, then shrugged before hurrying to catch up to his long-legged benefactor. If he wanted to kill me, I’d already be dead.

  Grale led him down the maintenance tunnel for a bit and then went through another door, which took them to a ladder that led down into a sewer pipe, judging by the ankle-deep water, smell, and cat-sized rats that hissed and scurried away. In places where there was no light, Grale turned on a flashlight, though Knight got the impression it was more for his sake than his guide’s.

  Knight had quickly lost his bearings and had no sense of what direction they were heading. In general it seemed to be ever farther down, though they sometimes had to go up a ladder in order to go down three more levels. They passed through a variety of doors and openings, including some that were not man-made but clefts in the rock leading to paths that linked with their man-made counterparts.

  They’d been walking for perhaps a half hour when they reached a dimly lit intersection of several tunnels. Grale stopped, motioning for Knight to do the same as he called out, “I’m looking for the entrance to the kingdom of heaven.”

  “And how do you gain entrance?” a voice shouted back from the dark outside the circle of light.

  “The love of Christ,” Grale replied before turning to grin at Knight. “It seems you knew our password.”

  “I have no idea why I said that,” Knight said. “Dumb luck and fear, I guess.”

  Grale shook his head and placed a hand on Knight’s shoulder. “Not luck, brother, no such thing. It was divine intervention,” he said as he resumed walking toward the other voice. “Good evening, brothers.”

  Two men materialized out of the dark—one carried a bow with an arrow nocked, the other an older-model rifle, and both had long knives on their belts. Dirty and ragged, they appeared to Knight to be ordinary street people, except for the fact that their eyes were clear and steady, and on second glance looked more like photographs he’d seen of Czech resistance fighters from World War II.

  “Evening, father,” said the older of the two, tipping his cap to Grale. “A visitor?”

  “God be with you, my son. Yes, Brothers Harvey and Chuck, meet Brother Bruce. I vouch for him,” Grale replied, making a vague sign of the cross before turning away from the pair and continuing their journey into the bowels of the city.

  “‘Father’? ‘My son’? Are you a priest?” Knight asked.

  “No. I was a Catholic layperson on the outside before I inherited my kingdom,” Grale replied. “But the Mole People seem to have accepted me as their spiritual leader while adopting my mission to fight against the coming darkness. We have quite a few Catholics and Lutherans, and with no one else to serve their needs, I am their de facto priest. Others of different faiths, and even the stray agnostic, have picked up the honorific.”

  “The Mole People? I think I read an article in the New York Times a while back about the Mole People—something like thirty thousand homeless people living beneath the city in subway tunnels and sewers,” Knight said as they walked.

  “I’m aware of the article,” Grale said, his voice hardening. “It was replete with errors, misinformation, and lies. For one thing, the article cast a large umbrella over many people and called them all the Mole People—murderers, rapists, the depraved, and criminally insane lumped in with those whose only crime is poverty. Oh, they may be tormented by addictions to alcohol and drugs, maybe even struggling with mental illness, but by and large they are good people down on their luck. However, they were all painted with the same broad brush by the article, which further isolated them from society—they’re now avoided on the streets by ‘normal’ people rather than extended the hand of Christian charity.”

  As he listened to Grale, Knight realized that his guide was more a philosopher than the usual street person. When they were able to walk side by side, he stole glances at the other man’s face as he spoke.

  Grale was gaunt to the point of skeletal, with deep-set eyes, hollow cheeks, and a sharp aquiline nose above his thick mustache and beard, but he had clearly once been a handsome man and there was still a nobility to his visage. He was also younger than Knight first thought, fooled by the creases that radiated from the man’s eyes and mouth and crossed his forehead. Knight guessed him to be in his midthirties.

  “I found it alarming that the article missed that most of the real Mole People aren’t society’s castoffs and misfits, nor are they coming from the ranks of the traditionally poor, though that class has grown, too,” Grale said. “Whatever our makeup ten years ago, currently our ranks swell with the recently impoverished, the great disappearing middle class, who find themselves suddenly homeless, penniless, and now among the ‘have-nots.’ These are the new immigrants to my kingdom beneath the streets, and this country had better wake up or there will be no middle class, only class warfare.”

  “That’s the third reference to your ‘kingdom,’” Knight noted. “So you are a guardian, a de facto priest, and a king?”

  Grale did not answer immediately but trudged on. They rounded a corner, and although he couldn’t see beyond the reach of his guide’s flashlight, Knight could feel that he had stepped into a large open space. The flashlight wasn’t the only illumination as all around him there were odd diffused lights; some even climbed partway up the dark space across from where he stood.

  “This, Mr. Knight, is my kingdom, the kingdom of the Mole People,” Grale said, and called out loudly to the dark, “The peace of Christ be upon you!”

  “And upon you!” dozens of voices called out from around the space.

  “We have a new visitor tonight,” Grale announced. “Brother James, would you please turn up the house lights for a minute so that Brother Bruce can get a good look at our home.”

  “Now, father? It’s after hours,” a voice whined off to their right.

  “It’s just for a moment, Jim,” Grale replied, sounding perturbed. “Newcomers are disoriented enough without being able to get a sense of their surroundings. And, besides, he knew the password.”

  Knight was soon aware that the light was growing, and with that came the realization he was standing at the entrance to a cavern the same approximate size as Madison Square Garden. The glowing lights turned out to be electric bulbs behind cloth hung in front of living quarters built or carved into the walls. Curious, the Mole People peered out from their hovels—men, women, and even some children.

  “Welcome to my kingdom,” Grale said with a grand sweep of his hand. “Come, follow me to my throne.”

  Knight followed Grale over to a long, raised cement platform, looking around as they walked. Although much of the cavern appeared to be natural, or at least carved crudely from the bedrock of M
anhattan Island, the rest was obviously constructed by engineers.

  “A long time ago this was a subway station,” Grale explained. “They were trying to expand when engineers discovered a dangerous fault in the rock, and the station was abandoned and another built quite close to here. Although there are a number of other places beneath the city where my people reside, this is the inner sanctum, accessible only to those who know the password.”

  “You have electricity,” Knight said, stating the obvious.

  “Courtesy of the New York transit system,” Grale said with a laugh. “The Mole People come from many walks of life, including electricians capable of tying into the juice that runs the subway. It’s all magic to me, but apparently they even know how to shut the whole system down with a flick of a switch, though of course we use only enough power to light and provide a little heat for our humble homes.”

  Grale led him up onto a raised platform on which sat a large leather overstuffed chair that might have once dominated a Fifth Avenue penthouse living room but had seen better years. Several smaller chairs formed a semicircle to either side of the “throne.” He was invited to have a seat on one of the lesser chairs while Grale plopped down on the leather chair.

  Reaching above him to turn on a standing lamp, Grale called out, “Brother James, would you please dim the lights again so our family may sleep?” Brother James didn’t answer but the house lights dimmed and then went out, leaving only the lights in the living quarters around the walls and Grale’s lamp.

  When they’d settled in their seats, Grale leaned forward, the shadows of his face deepening beneath the light of his lamp. “So, Brother Bruce,” he’d said, “do you want to tell me how you came to be shivering on the doorstep of the Mole People?”

  Knight was still thinking about that night as he and his two escorts approached a vaguely familiar intersection of tunnels. He had not recognized much of the route they’d taken, though he knew from experience that the Mole People rarely took the same way back to their homes. As Grale had explained to him that first night, they had many enemies. “Some are criminals and violent men who seek revenge on some of us or think we’d be ‘easy’ targets,” he’d said. “But some are officers of the law, even federal agents, looking for some of us.”

  Grale had laughed. “It might alarm you to know that if I was caught, I’d be arrested and tried for multiple counts of murder,” he said. “But I can assure you I’ve never killed anyone who didn’t deserve it.”

  There was one other group whose presence made the Mole People take the security of their home seriously. “We call them the Others,” Grale explained. “They live beneath the streets, too. Vicious, deranged killers who have formed their own communities ruled by whoever is the most violent and evil. They are demons who have taken over the bodies of human beings. As called upon by God, we hunt them, but they in turn hunt us, especially if we wander the dark paths alone and unarmed. You must always be on guard against them.”

  Having started to relax around Grale, Knight was taken aback by the comments about demons. He really is quite deranged himself, he’d thought at the time, though I have to admit there is something else about him that makes me feel safe.

  Now, passing through one sewer tunnel with Dirty Warren and Booger, Knight noticed large, elaborate, and quite well-done paintings on a wall. “I don’t remember this,” he said.

  “It’s the … whoop oh boy ass … latest thing in the underground art scene,” Dirty Warren explained. “They’re the crème de la crème of graffiti artists, who sneak down and paint on sewer walls and subway tunnels. Some are actually pretty famous in the art world; I’ve even seen some photos of their art in the magazines I sell at my newsstand. Unfortunately … piss tits … we sometimes have to chase them off—contributing of course to urban myths about bogeymen who live beneath the streets. They’re harmless, and I think a lot of their stuff is pretty good and … whoop whoop ohhhhboy oh boy … livens up the place, but we don’t want anybody accidentally stumbling on the kingdom and giving us away to the police or our enemies.”

  As they approached the familiar-looking intersection, Dirty Warren called out, “I’m looking for the … piss damn whoop … entrance to the kingdom of heaven.”

  “And how do you gain entrance?” a voice shouted back.

  “The love of … whoop … Christ.”

  Knight looked amused. “You haven’t changed the password in four years?”

  Dirty Warren shrugged. “David doesn’t see the … oh boy crap … need. Let’s keep moving, David’s a bit more … uh whoop whoop … temperamental than maybe the last time you saw him.”

  “Temperamental?” Knight said.

  “Yeah, and it’s getting … oh boy … worse,” Dirty Warren replied.

  Knight caught the scowl on his guide’s face and the worried tone in his voice. So the madness continues, he thought, again harkening back to his introduction to the Mole People.

  After telling his story to Grale that first night, he’d been given a hot meal and a cot to sleep on. The next morning, he stood before his benefactor again.

  “I trust you slept well, brother,” Grale had said, stroking his long beard as he sat on his leather throne. “At least it had to be better than a concrete floor in a subway tunnel.”

  “Much,” Knight replied. “I’m very grateful.”

  Grale nodded. “As I said to you last night, I believe there is more at work here than mere chance or dumb luck. What that may be we shall learn in God’s own time. Meanwhile, I’d like to make you an offer. You are welcome to join us. You’ll be given a place to stay and share in our meals. You’ll be expected to join one of our work parties—everybody who is able does—but nothing too onerous.”

  “That’s very kind of you,” Knight replied, thinking that at least for the winter, having someplace warm with food was an attractive option, even if it was underground.

  “Good,” Grale said, smiling, then he frowned. “However, we do have rules here, starting with no alcohol or drugs, which, along with any criminal activities or acts that place my people or our home in danger, will be cause to have you expelled. And in the case of traitors, the punishment is much worse. Do you understand?”

  Gathering what Grale had just implied, Knight could only nod. He wondered if he could do without the alcohol—craving a drink even then—though he saw a glimmer of hope that enforced abstinence might free him from its influence. He had no intention of doing any other sort of criminal activity, or of being a traitor, so he knew he was safe in that regard and tried not to think what the punishment might entail.

  Grale looked long and hard at him before nodding. “One more thing: you are welcome to leave us at any time. However, for the first few months—before you’ve proved yourself and know your way around—you will always be led outside by escorts who will confuse the way back to the kingdom. If you choose to leave us, you can’t come back without an escort. And finally, a word of caution: if you try to leave on your own, or return on your own, we will deal with you harshly. However, we will probably not need to; if the Others find you wandering the labyrinth, there will be no helping you.”

  Grale’s lecture had sent chills up his spine, but having nowhere else to turn, he’d opted to remain with the Mole People. And he soon learned to like most of the kingdom’s inhabitants and their king.

  As Grale noted during one of their many conversations, the Mole People society was based on early Christian communities where everyone worked for the common good, sharing the successes and hardships of their lives together. Those who could not work—including women with small children, the infirm, and those too ill—were taken care of by the community. Those who could work were divided into various parties. Some begged on the streets, others scoured Dumpsters and alleys throughout the city for food and anything that might be useful or sold at a secondhand store. Some even worked menial jobs, bringing their wages back to put in the community pot.

  Grale oversaw all of it. Although he d
elegated some authority and day-to-day functions to trusted lieutenants, he was every bit the warrior-king who ruled on disagreements; presided over social events, including officiating at marriages; ruled on matters of the community’s laws; and meted out punishments. While he could be imperious and harsh, he was also gentle and loving, spending long hours walking among his people offering words of encouragement and tending to the sick. Most called him “Father,” though he took no offense when some simply referred to him as David. Nor was there a requirement that his people believe in any particular religious credo, so in addition to Christians, there was a sprinkling of residents of other faiths, as well as agnostics and atheists.

  There was another side to Grale, however. His people referred to his “dark moods,” when he would sit on his throne for hours, even days, hardly moving, or even talking, except to himself or to lash out over small or imagined issues. Often during these periods, he would roam his subterranean world, or the streets above at night, killing—murdering, Knight reminded himself—men and even women he believed were evil and inhabited by demons.

  The vigilante killings rankled Knight as a man and as a defense attorney. He had a hard time stomaching Grale’s self-appointed position as judge, jury, and lord high executioner, but he said nothing, knowing it would do no good. Although Grale seemed to enjoy his conversations with Knight and they’d spent hours discussing philosophy, the law, and world events, he didn’t come to him for advice on how to rule his dark world.

  Indeed, the only man who seemed to have the king’s ear was Brother James, a small, gnomish man who had apparently once been an electrical engineer and was responsible for many of the “civilized” attributes of the kingdom. He had once had a family and a good job, but something—no one knew quite what—had caused him to lose both, and he’d found his way to the Mole People, among whom his technical abilities, despite his bitter personality, had made him welcome.