Make Me a City

by Jonathan Carr

  I told him to look inside himself instead, and learn to be a man. “This wound will take some time to heal,” I added.

  “It stings,” he said.

  “Yerra. That’s a good sign,” I told him. “Old Conn said the sting of an honest wound earns the respect of all mankind.”

  * * *

  That is where this tale ends, my young friend. I am weary and the hour is late. Write down what you will, I shall be none the wiser. But I tell you this. A father has grand dreams for the future of his son, but he can only do so much. The day comes when he must cast him loose, and leave what follows in the hands of the Great Master.

  1867

  THE HAUNTED TUNNEL

  This short story, set in 1867 and written by Thomas Hunter, was published by A. C. McClurg & Co., Chicago, in the March 1896 edition of the magazine The Dial. Thomas Hunter’s wife is the journalist Antje Hunter (née Van Voorhis) of the Chicago Daily Tribune.

  I GIVE YOU, dear reader, fair warning. The story I am about to tell you is mostly true, even though it may not have happened. My role is merely that of amanuensis. I have transcribed the story on behalf of its narrator as faithfully as I can, a man who (I believe) had his own reasons for wanting the tale to appear fantastical. Where I have made additions, they are of a purely descriptive nature, putting more flesh, if you will, on the bare bones of what happened, or what may have happened. I invite anyone who is skeptical about the existence of spirits or monsters to read this tale as a straightforward ghost story that will, I hope, prove entertaining. But for readers who accept there may indeed be more things in Heaven and earth than are dreamt of in Horatio’s philosophy, I offer a word of warning: beware.

  The events I describe take place on the night of a full moon. Our protagonist, an Engineer, tells his wife he is going out for a walk. He doffs his top hat, takes hold of his cane and steps onto Clybourn Street. In terms of appearance and age, the Engineer is a tall, broad-shouldered and unremarkable gentleman of fifty-three years. He looks well fed, fit and strong, and his attire is smart without being ostentatious. He walks with a mild stoop, typical of a man whose life has become more deskbound than it once was. The casual observer might assume he is a respectable, successful man of affairs who, like many a resident on a hot summer night, is trying to escape the unholy stench from the Union Stockyards that has hung over the city all day. If we search for clues to his character, we might find one in the striking gray beard he wears—it is longer than fashionable and, on close inspection, does not look to have been groomed for some time—evidence perhaps of a man who keeps up appearances but without much enthusiasm. We might also note the intensity with which he observes the world about him. This is a person who, despite his advancing years, finds it difficult to relax and enjoy the world for what it is. He must always know what it is made of and how it works. Oh, and there are his hands, of course. They are the big, strong hands of a practical man.

  Tonight, he is in an odd mood, a very odd mood indeed. In fact, he is not at all himself. He walks without apparent purpose. Indecisiveness, as it happens, is a charge his detractors unfairly make against him. At some point, he finds himself in a park where the foul city air becomes pleasantly sweetened by the scent of honeysuckle and clover, and the grass is soft beneath his feet. As he passes between the trees, he absentmindedly forgets what they really are, pausing to speculate on the nature of their foundations, to tap their trunks with his cane, and to look for the joints and screws that must be holding such tall, thin structures upright. He chuckles, with self-conscious embarrassment, when he realizes his mistake. He continues toward the Lake.

  He steps into a rowing boat, and plies the oars. The pale yellow moon is massive and rising. All along, it has been drawing him on. He knows where he is being taken. There is a misshapen hulk, out in the Lake, that looks like a shipwreck. This hulk is called the Crib. The boat slips through the still water. The Crib looms larger and larger. Fear begins to tickle his thoughts. For it should be acknowledged that, underneath, the Engineer can be an anxious fellow, a weakness he has to work exceedingly hard to hide. He says he inherited that trait from his Welsh mother—long since departed—who, despite employing dozens of tricks to ward off evil, always feared the worst. What if the Crib, thinks the Engineer, is not really the Crib? What if it is a hideous monster? What if it is alive?

  But the Crib is not alive and is indeed nothing more or less than the Crib.6 A watchman is leaning over the rail, a lamp in his hand. The Engineer wonders why he knows everything there is to know about the Crib. Then he remembers that it was he who dreamed it up in the first place, just as it was he who dreamed up the Tunnel that runs beneath the bottom of the Lake, connecting the Crib to the shore.

  The watchman’s face, when he catches sight of his visitor, turns a deathly white, as if he has seen a ghost. “G … good evening, Engineer,” he stutters.

  While he ascends the ladder to the deck, numbers come to him, a stream of numbers whose arrival he finds deeply pleasurable, even though he cannot remember what they are for. Numbers are everything to the Engineer. It is with numbers that he makes sense of the world even if, in this curious mood, he can no longer tell whether these numbers refer to feet or inches, planks or nails, tons or gallons, miles or dollars. They come and go, flashing like fireflies. One number—by far the biggest—recurs again and again.

  “Fifty-seven million what?” he asks the watchman.

  “That would be gallons of water, Engineer.”

  “Every day,” he says, remembering.

  “Yes, Engineer. That would be every day.”

  The watchman is proffering his Davy lamp, which signals to him what he must do next. He says he is going down, that he has to check something urgently—the flow rate or the water quality or a stretch of the Tunnel’s brickwork where cracks have been reported. “I shall be down there for some time,” he says.

  “Y … yes, of course, Engineer.”

  * * *

  A sticky black fog fills the netherworld beneath the surface of the Lake. The Engineer, who suffers from a phobia of being buried alive in one of his own underground tunnels, proceeds cautiously down the first ladder, staring intently at everything illumined by the lamp. He is alert to each small sound, notices each infinitesimal shift in the Crib’s foundations, recoils from each drop of condensation as though he has been stung. In this slow, halting fashion, he descends the shaft, inching past the architecture of silent pumps and pipes that he knows best as lines, angles and elevations on a chart. The air is stale and damper than a mildewed cellar. Indeterminate whiffs of decomposition come his way.

  The farther he goes, the more the Engineer becomes suffused by a sense of dread. Why is he tormenting himself like this? Why not go back now, before it’s too late? The weight of water is immense. More gallons lie in the Lake than can be conceived of in the human mind. What if his calculations are wrong? A strident Irish whisper, worryingly familiar, fills his head. You in’t a janius, then, you’s a murd’rer. A murd’rer … murd’rer … murd’rer. The last word will not stop. It comes back off the chamber walls. He fears he could, indeed, be that murderer, but he cannot remember why.

  The shaft narrows the deeper he goes. The dankness is seeping into his clothes. His shirt and breeches are too tight. The world seems to be contracting. He fears imminent suffocation. Might he be losing his mind? He panics. He wants to get out; he yearns for light and air and dry land. He tosses his top hat into the darkness, he tears off the collar at his throat, he cries out “Let me go,” but no sound emerges from his lips. The shaft swivels on, and swivels down.

  Perversely, the numbers in his head grow clearer. But they are no longer pretty fireflies. They glow in the shapes of bright, malevolent grins.

  84 steps. 3 ladders. 19 feet below.

  5-foot diameter. 2 miles long.

  2-foot slope per mile. 4 miles per hour…

  They are my numbers, he thinks, numbers I made. And those numbers have come back to taunt me. The Tunnel
is reached by 84 steps, down 3 ladders. It lies 19 feet below the bottom of the Lake, it has a 5-foot diameter, it stretches for 2 miles, slopes at 2 feet per mile, and the water travels at 4 miles per hour.

  Before he can dwell any further on the treachery of his numbers, he stops, mid-step, in alarm. He has heard a strange, unearthly cry that seems to be coming from somewhere in the very bowels of the earth. It is an enraged, tormented sound. That must be how a werewolf, he thinks, howls at the moon. There is another outburst, identical to the first. Then there is another. He holds his breath and listens. He listens until the cries have stopped and the echoes have dissipated into nothing. Maybe it was indeed a werewolf howling at the moon. Maybe they came from above, not below. But in his heart he knows the truth.

  When he takes another step down the ladder, his legs feel shaky. There is a rush of warm, rancid air. He holds out the lamp, but all he can see is a trickle of condensation running down the brickwork. How did the watchman put it? That would be gallons of water, Engineer. Would be. Does that mean the Tunnel is not yet finished? But surely it is finished. Surely it has been finished for a long time. Hasn’t someone already declared the Tunnel “the wonder of America and the world?” How could it be called a “wonder” if it was not yet completed?

  He feels angry. Angry that he is here, angry that there is no way back, angry that he cannot understand what is happening. The full moon brings many things. It brings lunacy, it brings murder and pregnancy and nightmares and sleepwalkers and werewolves. And it brings ghosts. Yes, above all, the full moon brings back the dead.

  He drops the lamp and falls off the ladder. For how long does he fall and fall through the under-Lake darkness before he is falling no more? He finds himself on his feet again, the lamp back in his hand. And he hears new sounds. A hubbub of thuds and thumps and scrapes. The sound of digging.

  Ahead of him, he can make out a boat. This one, unlike his rowboat, is a narrow, flat-bottomed vessel. A shadowy figure—the oarsman—is waiting aboard. Everything, finally, makes sense. The Tunnel is finished, but it will not be opened until tomorrow. Yes, not until tomorrow will it be called the “wonder of America and the world.” He does not know how he knows this, but he does. He is about to carry out the final inspection. That is why this boat is waiting for him. And the hubbub of thuds and thumps and scrapes? Some workers must be out there, doing their last-minute repairs.

  He steps aboard. The boat is stocked with tools—picks, trowels, drills, hammers, a heap of sand, a bag of cement. There is also a stretch of copper piping. He places a hand on the arch of bricks overhead to hold himself steady. The bricks, damp and cold against his palm, reassure him that this is real.

  The oarsman propels them forward. The Engineer, holding up his lamp, inspects the brickwork reflected in the leaky yellow light. The thuds and thumps and scrapes of the workers’ picks grow louder. He hears their shovels heaping the clay earth onto trolleys. The Engineer begins to feel apprehensive, but he does not know why. He raises the lamp and looks ahead. The air is changing. It is being filled by a stench like the Union Stockyards. He can make out the emaciated shapes of diggers at work. They move in silence. Only the shovels scrape as they lift their loads of clay, only the trolleys groan and squeal along the tracks, only the piercing whistles of the foreman echo back and forth through a gloom that is neither day nor night. It is hellish, awful, unbearable. Their phantom bodies, bare to the waist, are coated in grime and sweat. Eyes flash in the lamplight, unseeing, red with dust and hurt. And beyond he sees masoners bricking up the newly excavated space, racing to prevent its collapse. There is the slop of water, the grind of mortar, the slap slap slap and scoop of trowels.

  The Engineer cannot understand why they are here.

  Suddenly, he is in the middle of them, encircled by wraiths armed with picks and spades and shovels. They are staring at him through hollow eyes. He is spattered by drops of deadman spit and sweat. He strikes out at the sea of gaunt, accusing faces. But it is like striking thin air. A voice calls out, the same Irish voice he heard before, the one he recognizes but cannot place, and he understands this voice is speaking for them all: You’re no janius, like they say, now ain’t that so? I tell ye this and I tell ye true. We ain’t be savidges the way you think. A dollar a day ain’t jistice in Archer’s Avenue, nor in this Tunnil neither. Seven Irish workers dead as donkeys ten fath’ms deep when the roof fell in. You’re no janius but a comm’n murd’rer … murd’rer … murd’rer. Dear God, the calculations must have been wrong. He strikes out ever more desperately at the wraiths, to try to find that voice and silence it. To that seven, add one more. One more, one more, one more is yet to die. Murd’rer … murd’rer … murd’rer. The voice fades and as their boat moves on, the phantoms begin to sing. The Tunnel is flooded by a great chorus of Irish voices, rich and sweet as angels. The voices rise and fall and rise again, full of rage and despair at their own deaths.

  One more is yet to die. The Engineer knows what he must do. He must prevent that final death. But who is it? Which one is he, of those hundreds that have worked in the Tunnel?

  He has no time to think because another bloodcurdling howl rings out. The oarsman brings the boat to a halt. The Engineer crouches and, the lamp held high, stares into the darkness. Only a creature not of this world could make such a hideous sound.

  How long do those ferocious cries echo through the Tunnel? How long is it before the oarsman begins to push them forward again? The Engineer wants him to turn back, he wants to return to the safety of the Crib, but he can issue no instructions. No words will come out of his mouth. The oarsman stands erect, driving them forward. All the Engineer can do is watch.

  The air is changing. It is unnaturally warm and ominously rotten.

  Another howl breaks out, this time so close and loud that the Tunnel shakes on its foundations. The din comes thundering toward them like an express train. There is an onrush of hot, moldering air and they are plunged into darkness. He must have knocked over the Davy lamp, but they are still moving forward. What does the oarsman think he is doing? Why doesn’t he turn back? Oh, how he would rant and rave, what a reprimand he would deliver, if only he could speak to the man.

  The reverberations of one more tormented bellow are followed by a rush of putrid air that comes spinning toward him with the force of a whirlwind, around and around the tightness of the Tunnel. He is knocked backward, into the water. The world turns black.

  But though he might wish darkness and oblivion to be the end, it is not. He does not die. His eyes are wide open. He is forced to watch as his oarsman propels the boat forward, toward a dark shape that fills the Tunnel, toward a shape that looks grotesque, toward a shape that looks alive. Two beams of light are its cold, green eyes. The face is that of an enormous cat, whiskers stiff as ship’s cordage sprung from each side of a head clad in bedraggled gray fur. In front, the brute rests on two giant paws, padded by clumps of more fur, bristling with long, curved nails that taper to a point. But the body of this fiend is not that of a cat. The Engineer catches a glimpse of its cumbrous slithering bulk when the colossus shifts its weight, to reveal a heaving wad of slimy, misshapen copper-colored scales.

  Opening wide its mouth, the monster seizes the boat between its jaws. The Engineer wants to do something. He wants to fight, he wants the oarsman to get out of harm’s way, he wants this to end.

  But it does not end.

  He watches a set of gnarled, yellow teeth grind the boat to splinters, spitting out the debris in dark-flecked spume. He watches the oarsman, erect and fearless to the end, thrust his pole deep inside the creature’s cavernous mouth, which roils with foul saliva. He watches the pole snap like a twig. He watches the ogre heave itself laboriously, clumsily, gracelessly around the confines of the Tunnel. He watches the scales shift like giant links of chain mail on a tail that narrows to a solid tip the width of a stout club that, with one short flick, knocks the oarsman over. The massive paws, their tufts of gray fur stiffening and the scimitar-shap
ed nails drawn to their full extent, stamp him to death.

  And that is when the awful truth comes to him. The oarsman was the man he had to save. The oarsman was the eighth man, and he was always there, in front of his eyes. But all the Engineer has done is watch.

  The beast turns, it slams a paw against the roof, the Tunnel trembles as bricks fly down. The Lake rushes in and fills up the Engineer like a bottle.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I thought it might be of interest to readers to hear of how I came upon the material that inspired me to write this story. Late in his life, I had the privilege of becoming acquainted with Chicago’s great sanitary engineer, Mr. Ellis S. Chesbrough. On one occasion, I asked him about the famous Crib and Intake Tunnel he built to solve Chicago’s chronic problem of polluted water in the 1860s. Even in old age, he had a remarkable grasp of the details of their construction, about which I took copious notes (without ever imagining I would actually make use of them).

  The next time I saw him, he was keen to speak again about the Crib and Tunnel. He wanted to tell me something, he said, that wasn’t “entirely factual.” He proceeded to recount details of “a recurring nightmare” from which he said he continued to suffer. It is this nightmare I have recorded in “The Haunted Tunnel.” Nightmares are not, generally, promising material for a story. They have neither the craft of myth nor the psychological accuracy of truth. Also, a recurring nightmare is usually influenced so much by the life of its recipient that it is rendered incomprehensible.

  After finishing the story, I asked my wife—Antje Hunter—to read it through for me. As a reporter she is more concerned about facts than I am, and the story prompted her to do some research in the archives of the Chicago Daily Tribune on the subject of Mr. Chesbrough’s Crib and Tunnel. Two small items she unearthed may be of interest to readers of this story. I should stress, though, that “The Haunted Tunnel” was written before I saw these reports and it is presented here with not a word added or changed. Whether or not these cuttings have any bearing on the story, I leave to the judgment of my readers.