by Lisa Unger
“Jeff and Dax had to run out,” said Rebecca, her Brooklyn accent thick, drifting out over cotton candy pink lips. She had a round pretty face and a sophisticated layered blond bob. Her face was dominated by bright, deep brown eyes.
“Jeff said he’ll call and to stay with Ford McKirdy until he does.”
“Was that an order?” Lydia asked, directing her annoyance at Rebecca, who really didn’t deserve it. She noticed how Ford kept his nose in the magazine during this encounter, not even looking over at them.
Rebecca lifted up her hands, cool and unflappable as she always was. “Don’t shoot the messenger. They were out of here like their pants were on fire.”
“Where did they go?”
“I swear, Lydia, I have no idea.”
Lydia had the distinct impression that she had been “handed off” to Ford, and the thought filled her with resentment and a fierce need to bust away from all of them. But what bothered her most of all was wondering where Dax and Jeffrey had gone and why they hadn’t told her where they were going. It was totally out of character and she felt a swell of anxiety that she couldn’t quash. A hard twinge in her lower right abdomen caused her to inhale sharply.
“You okay?” asked Ford, glancing over at her. But the pain passed as quickly as it had come.
“I think so,” Lydia said, though in her heart a tiny seed of dread was blooming.
• • •
Dax and Jeff walked down the stairway that led to the long-closed Lafayette Street station. As they rounded the bend past the staircase, they faced a locked metal gate. A bright hard shaft of light shone in from the street above them, but on the other side of the gate a tunnel led into such blackness that it looked as though a curtain had been drawn. The walls around them were covered with the work of graffiti artists, and the single bulb that lit the tunnel buzzed and dimmed, threatening to go dark. Jeff watched as Dax removed a key from his pocket and fit it into the lock on the gate.
“Where’d you get that?” asked Jeff, pointing toward the key.
“Apparently, when the city retires subway stations, they put these special locks on the gates. They make about four hundred keys for transit workers. But my contact told me about a hardware store in Brooklyn that actually sells copies of the key, if you can imagine. I thought she was full of shit, but here you go.” He removed the padlock, unraveling the chain and opening the door.
“Leave it open in case we need to get out of here in a hurry,” said Jeff. Dax nodded as he wrapped the chain back through the metal bars and hung the padlock from the last link.
Dax jumped down on the tracks and Jeffrey followed. They made their way through the dank and dirty tunnel, the rumbling of trains audible in the distance, the stench of urine and mold heavy in the air. Beneath the streets of New York City was a labyrinthine network of subway and train tunnels, gas and water mains, sewer lines and cables. There were layers of lines for phone, cable, and electric, street and traffic lights, then gas mains on top of water mains. There were over a hundred miles of steam mains, below which lay the sewer lines and tunnels. The organization of this vast network was pure chaos. No cohesive map of the underground network existed. Over the years so many different companies had been responsible for the installation of lines and networks that even the workers responsible for upkeep and repairs now never knew what they would find when they entered the tunnels. Jeffrey had read that a merchant sailing vessel from the eighteenth century was found under Front Street, part of the landfill when Manhattan’s lower tip was being extended. Wall Street was named for a three-hundred-year-old wall that still stood beneath the street, presumably designed to keep out intruders, probably Indians.
Below all of that were miles of abandoned subway tunnels and stations. Here thousands of homeless people were rumored to live, creating communities and social networks beneath the streets. Most people considered the idea of people living under the streets to be an urban legend, too fantastical to be true. But working with the NYPD for so long on so many different cases, Jeffrey had learned that this was a sad and certain fact. One that the police tried to keep as quiet as possible. The burgeoning homeless population was one of the department’s greatest challenges and the fact that thousands of displaced people now lived beneath the city didn’t make the situation any better.
“Why does your contact think he’s down there and how did she know to tell you?” Jeffrey had asked Dax back at the office. Dax had looked reluctant to reveal how he got his information.
“I put the word out there with some of the people I know on the street and this is what came back,” he said with a shrug. “It’s going to cost you, too. I had to pay five hundred dollars for it. Plus another seven at McDonald’s.”
“Just put it on your expense report,” said Jeff absently. “What do you mean, you ‘put the word out there’?”
“You know, there’s this network aboveground and belowground. Information is passed from one person to the next.”
“So it’s about as reliable as a game of ‘Telephone.’ ”
“It’s all we have, mate. Let’s check it out,” Dax said sensibly. “We’ve got nothing to lose.”
Maybe you have nothing to lose, thought Jeff.
So they’d waited for Ford to arrive, filled him in on their plans, and asked him to stay with Lydia until they got back. Then they slipped out before her meeting with Eleanor was over. He knew she wasn’t going to be happy. But there was no way he was going to allow her to tag along on this errand and there would have been no way to stop her if she knew where they were going. So he’d take his beating later.
“According to Danielle, the entrance should be coming up here on the right,” Dax said, his voice low. A moment later they came upon an opening in the concrete wall. They could hear voices in the distance. Dax and Jeff exchanged a look. “After you,” said Jeff with a smile, and Dax disappeared into the hole. Jeffrey followed him into the darkness.
The New York State Facility for the Criminally Insane rose like a beige monument to misery against the horizon. Lydia and Ford had driven for miles through heavy trees without passing another car or seeing another building, and a light snow had started to fall. Whether it was the stark lines of the structure, or the bars on the windows, or just the knowledge of the hell within its walls, Lydia went cold inside as they grew closer. The place had always existed in her imagination as a house of horrors … where patients suffering from disease of the mind, and maybe the soul, wandered about trying to sort out reality from delusion. She imagined flickering lights, wet gray hallways, somewhere the sound of someone scraping, someone moaning. A place where the cures—shock therapy, lobotomy—were more horrifying than the disease. She wondered if the walls of the structure soaked up the nightmare visions of its residents, she wondered if their fantasies lived somehow in the concrete and gates—if that’s why the sight of it filled her with dread.
She was glad there was still a half an hour of distance to cover; she was almost sorry she had come at all. What good did it do for her to come to this place, former home of Jed McIntyre? It was like she was always trying to prove something … how brave, how strong, how able she was to handle any situation.
“So how’s Rose?” asked Lydia, trying to make idle conversation. Billy Joel sang “The Piano Man” on the easy listening station and his tune crackled and sounded tinny on the cheap car speakers. The moment of silence that followed her question told Lydia that she’d said the wrong thing.
“Better than ever, if you ask her,” he said with a small laugh. “She left me about a year ago.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, looking at him. He tapped his finger on the steering wheel and she watched his jaw work. Instead of letting it drop, she asked, “What happened?”
She’d only met Rose a couple of times, once at a Christmas party the firm threw and once when the four of them had dinner one night at Burrito Loco on West Fourth Street more than two years ago. She wouldn’t have said that Ford and Rose looked overly ha
ppy together, but they had seemed like a set of people, like bookends, one less of itself without the other.
“What happened? I don’t know … what happens to people? I was an asshole and she put up with it for thirty years. Then she stopped wanting to put up with it. Said if she couldn’t be the center of my attention, then at least she could be the center of her own.”
They were both quiet for a second. Lydia thought he would go silent, but he went on as though he were glad for the release.
“She said when the kids were home it wasn’t so bad. She felt needed, loved. She was busy. But when they went away to live their lives, she realized that we didn’t have a life together. She saw the rest of her life stretching out ahead of her and she wasn’t sure she wanted to live it with me. Not the way I am, a workaholic, always putting the job first. I can’t really even blame her.”
“So she packed and left?”
“Pretty much,” he said with a shrug, remembering her there, waiting with her suitcase and her coat on.
“Did you try to stop her?”
“She didn’t want to be stopped.”
“Maybe she wanted you to go with her?”
He was silent, like it was a possibility he hadn’t considered.
“Well, its too late now,” he said finally.
“It’s never too late, Ford. Not after so many years. Not if you still love her. You should retire and go after her.”
“Yeah, right. What am I if I’m not a cop?”
“Maybe it’s time to find out.”
More silence as the hospital grew closer and loomed before them. Ford glanced over at her. She wondered if she’d stepped over a line with him. But she’d never been very good at staying inside the lines or keeping her opinions to herself.
“Sometimes, you know,” he said, “you’re so busy being yourself, so selfish, that you forget about the people who depend on you, who love you. You just walk through your life creating damage. By the time you notice, you feel too old, too tired to undo the mess you’ve made and there’s no turning back anyway.”
Lydia looked at the road ahead thinking what a sad way to have to look back at your life. She wondered if he was right.
“But you can always move forward,” she said. Ford shrugged and gave a polite nod as if he weren’t convinced but wanted the conversation to end. The conversation withered between them, leaving them both feeling a little worse than they’d felt before it started.
Ford took a right onto an access road. The snow was falling more heavily now, lightly blanketing the trees that surrounded them as far as she could see. They were in the middle of nowhere, which Lydia guessed was a good location for a place that housed dangerously insane criminals. She looked out the passenger window into woods and saw a high metal fence topped with razor wire running along the side of the road, almost invisible through the trees.
Of course, the reality of the hospital was nowhere near her twisted imagining of it. Originally built in the late 1800s, the New York State Facility for the Criminally Insane sat on nearly three hundred acres of heavily wooded land. The first mental hospital in New York and one of the first in the country, NYSFCI was remarkable for its history and its architecture. The main building, closed but still standing on the grounds, was designed by Captain William Clarke. The 550-foot-long edifice with its immense Doric columns was still imposing and grand, meant to exude an aura of authority and stability. And the rest of the buildings were a hodgepodge of different architectural styles, all unified by their gated windows and aura of pain.
Over the years the hospital endured a number of different incarnations. Initially it housed only civil commitments, people who were mentally ill but not necessarily dangerous. When violent and escape-prone convicts began to arrive from local prisons there in the 1950s, the institution became overburdened and a new building was erected on the same grounds for insane convicts. But even with the additions, the hospital became dangerously overcrowded.
It was closed briefly in the 1970s due to budget cuts and allegations of patient abuse and administrative corruption. But the prison systems became so overwhelmed with mentally ill prisoners that the hospital opened again in 1985. Just in time to provide a bed for Jed McIntyre. This was not a place people went to get well. It was a place intended to warehouse and manage people too ill for prison or society, though, of course, no one would ever officially admit that.
Two armed and uniformed guards manned the booth beside the mammoth metal gates that separated the hospital from the rest of the world. Lydia could see another in a tower high above them, the silhouette of a rifle visible from the ground. The younger of the two guards approached the car and Ford handed over his ID and shield. The man returned to the guardhouse and could be seen picking up a phone and briefly speaking into the receiver.
“Proceed to the visitors’ entrance,” the guard said when he returned to the car, handing back Ford’s identification.
The giant gate slid open and Ford drove forward, pausing before a second gate. The first gate closed with a heavy clang and Lydia looked behind her. She took a deep breath as the second gate opened and they drove up the road.
The odor in the tunnels was hard to describe except that it smelled so strongly of human rot and dank earth that it made Jeffrey’s eyes water. The two men forged their way through the darkness, behind the beam of Dax’s Maglite. Jeffrey held one hand over his mouth and nose against the odor and kept his other on the wall to his right. A strange crunching suddenly beneath their feet prompted Dax to shine the flashlight beam to the floor. Cockroaches the size of hamsters formed a writhing, skittering carpet on the ground.
“Holy Christ. I fucking hate bugs,” said Dax. “Ah, God. I wish I’d just left the light off.” They picked up their pace a bit and Jeff fought the urge to scratch every inch of his body.
“Do you have any idea where we’re going?” asked Jeffrey, glancing behind him at the fading shaft of light that marked their entrance. He tried not to think about the fact that if anything happened to them down here, they might never be found.
“There should be a stairway coming up,” said Dax. “Someone is supposed to meet us.”
“Another one of your mysterious contacts?”
“Something like that.”
“And what does this person know?”
“Well, we won’t find that out until we talk to her, will we?” said Dax.
In the distance, the acoustics of the tunnels making it impossible to tell if noise came from above or below, from in front or behind, they could hear the sound of voices. Briefly, Jeffrey swore he heard the sound of someone playing a flute. The tune was mournful and slow, melodic. Some diffused light made its way down from the gratings above them, enough so they could make out doorways, shapes in the darkness but not enough to really see. The wall was cool and wet beneath Jeffrey’s hand. A dripping could be heard from somewhere and twice something had brushed past his shoe. The Glock at his waist gave him no sense of security at all. They were underneath the world and reality felt suspended. Bullets couldn’t stop shadows.
“This is worse than I imagined it would be,” said Dax.
“No shit,” said Jeff.
“Figures an animal like Jed McIntyre would make a lair in a place like this,” said Dax. “I couldn’t think of a better place for him.”
“I can,” said Jeff.
Dax turned around to look at Jeffrey but saw only a shadow behind him. “Here we go,” he said after a moment, shining his light into an opening in the wall that led to pitch-nothingness. “Just where she said it would be.”
A flight of metal stairs took them into a new layer of darkness where whatever brightness had carried in from the streets above was extinguished by a damp and utter black. The silence was so total that Jeffrey could hear his breath and Dax’s, too. The stairs had led them to a narrow walkway, and at the end in the beam of Dax’s flashlight they could see a metal door with no handle. Jeffrey felt like they were in a tomb. They approached the ent
rance and stood for a moment.
“What do we do?” said Jeffrey.
“We knock,” said Dax, raising a big fist to the metal and banging hard.
Jetty Murphy reminded Lydia of nothing so much as Golem, the creature from The Hobbit that dwelled in darkness guarding his precious ring. Bent over and twisted like an old branch, he was so thin that his elbows looked like knobs and his collarbone stretched against his skin. His overlarge head seemed to bob on the end of his neck as if he didn’t possess enough strength to support it. Black oily curls hung past his shoulders. He cupped his hands together over his mouth and his fingers were long and ghoulish, with nails bitten to the quick, his eyes black saucers set in gaunt features. He rocked on his haunches in the chair across from Ford. An armed guard stood by the door and Lydia stood beside him.
“Do you remember me, Jetty?” asked Ford. He’d seated himself across from Jetty and sat relaxed, leaning back in the chair. Lydia noticed how he’d molded the expression on his face to a look of benevolence, of understanding.
“Of course I remember you. I’m crazy, not stupid,” Jetty said bitterly. He dropped his feet to the floor and pulled himself upright so that he was sitting with a straight back. He raised his chin in a gesture that seemed to mock dignity.
“It was a long time ago,” said Ford gently, running his fingers along the edge of the table. “Even I have a hard time remembering that far back. How long ago was it now?”
“Ten years or so,” Jetty answered with a shrug. “What do you want?”
“Something’s come up, Jetty. I think you can help me.”
“Help you?” he said, laughing a little, as if such a thing were beyond imagining. But Lydia saw a brightening in his expression, like he had something someone wanted and it was a new feeling for him.
“I want you to remember that night for me again. Tell me again what you saw.”
“What’s in it for me?” he said, looking over at Lydia quickly and then back at Ford. “Can you make me a deal?”