Night-Train

by Thomas F Monteleone

  “Shit, I can’t believe this … you sure you didn’t see anything fall in front of your train?”

  “Uh-uh. Nothin’, officer, I swear.”

  Provenza shook his head slowly, and exhaled. “All right, then. Let’s go. Sorry I screwed up your schedule.”

  Looking relieved, the motorman helped him up through the door and back into the first car. There were three passengers watching Provenza as he entered and the motorman jumped back into his cab, grabbing his microphone. John took the seat nearest to the sliding doors, and looked vacantly at the ad placards above the windows.

  As the train started to move, he kept replaying the scene in his mind. The footsteps, the roar of the approaching train, the blur of movement, and something disappearing beneath the front of the train—but whatever it was had simply vanished. He knew he wasn’t hallucinating, but there was no way to prove a damned thing.

  The train moved northward past the Bleecker Street and Astor Place stations, but John Provenza wasn’t paying much attention. He was thinking back to the week after his high-school graduation, the day that he went to work with his father in Manhattan sewers. His father had been with the Department of Sewers all of his life and thought it was a fine and respectable job. His father had seen no reason why his son should not follow in his father’s footsteps, right down into the dark, damp caverns beneath the streets.

  The only problem was that John had hated every minute of the two years he worked down there. It was dirtier than he liked, although not as filthy as the average person imagines, and he was in constant fear of contracting some bizarre disease that would kill him in his prime. He hadn’t been wild about the caliber of men he’d worked with—coarse and obnoxious in the main—because he feared that eventually he would become just like them.

  But his main objection was that it was a bit too spooky. Sometimes when he was working alone, he heard strange noises—something just out of the range of sight sloshing around in a collecting pool, or something scraping at the barrier of a closed sieve or an open grating. It always made him think about the apocryphal tales of alligators living in the depths, and he was terrified of ever running into one of them.

  The day he resigned—the day he had been accepted by NYPD to begin his training—had been the happiest of his life. And even though it was in the middle of January when he climbed from the sewers for the last time, the sun had felt warm and gentle on his face. He’d hated it down there, and he knew that it would always be that way.

  It was the same with the subways. They were far filthier than the sewers, and infinitely more dangerous. And as he sat on the Number 6 train as it surged northward, he wondered if he was letting his fears carry him away. Had he really heard anything, seen anything? Or was his imagination being controlled by that dark thing that lies in the pit of all our fears?

  The train pulled into the Union Square/14th Street station, and as it jerked to a halt, he was shaken from his memories. Time to get back to work. Time to get out there and catch the creep with the knife.

  Before he catches you.

  CHAPTER 12

  MARSDEN

  The weather was getting cooler as the month of October reached its midpoint, and a biting wind whipped through Washington Square as Lya headed for the Philosophy Department at NYU. After interviewing some of the other retiring employees from Transit, Lya knew it was time to talk to Dr. Lane Carter again. When she had called him to set up an appointment, he had sounded extremely happy to hear from her, implying that he had expected her to call.

  Lya thought that was a bit strange, but of course Dr. Carter himself was a bit strange. In a charming sort of way, she supposed, but still strange.

  The Philosophy Department was housed in a very old brick building off 8th Street, full of dimly lit halls tiled in drab linoleum. On the second floor, she stopped and asked the receptionist for directions to Dr. Carter’s office. She knocked on the thick wooden door and heard his voice sonorously invite her in.

  It was a small office, lined with bookcases crammed with dusty volumes. What little wall space remained was covered with prints of ancient mandalas, temple rubbings, and talismans. There was a glass display case, holding unrecognizable but obviously ancient objects, and an enormous wooden desk mounded over with papers, manuscripts, dog-eared books, and arcane charts. Lane Carter stood up from behind this mountain of scholarship and smiled through his smartly trimmed beard. He was wearing a black wool suit that was in need of a pressing, a white shirt, and a thin black tie. Lya’s image of Mephistopheles came immediately to her mind. Carter seemed to exude an aura of mystery and antiquity; she assumed that it was a carefully crafted image that he had created over the years to add a bit of drama to his lectures.

  “Miss Marsden! Oh, I’m sorry, you probably prefer Ms. Marsden, don’t you?! At any rate, how wonderful to see you again! Please take a chair—the only chair, I’m afraid.”

  “Thank you,” said Lya, sitting down. “I hope I’m not asking too much by wanting to see you like this, but—”

  “Nonsense! I always have time for the inquisitive, the curious turn of mind. What can I do for you?”

  Wasting no time, Lya launched into a recounting of her activities since her initial discussion with Carter. She even played back some fragments of the interview tapes of Mr. Frieter and the others, and finished up by showing him copies of the Times articles about the missing train, Number 93. All through the telling, Lane Carter said nothing, merely nodding sagely now and then as he smoked a cigarette.

  “And now,” Lya concluded, “I think I need some more background information, something to tie this together. I hoped I might talk to you about it.”

  Carter exhaled dramatically, swiveled his chair sideways, and looked at Lya beneath his thick, dark eyebrows. “Frankly, Ms. Marsden, I think you have barely scratched the surface.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Few people realize how old this city is. It goes back to the time of the Dutch and New Amsterdam! Why, we’re getting on towards our four-hundredth birthday! There are mysteries and wonders buried here; beneath our feet is a heritage that is rich with the odd and the bizarre.”

  “That’s the kind of information I’m going to need for my evening feature, Dr. Carter, and I was wondering if you would be willing to be interviewed for the show?”

  Carter smiled. “Of course, that’s the least I can do. But there is much more, my dear Ms. Marsden, much more. With the proper dedication, you could uncover more material than would fit—or, for that matter, more than would be fit—for a trailer on the evening news.”

  “About that missing train, Dr. Carter; how did you know about it?”

  Lighting another cigarette, Carter gestured at a shelf of books to his left. “I’ve been a casual student of New York for many, many years. In my studies of ancient religions, cults, and sects, I occasionally stumbled across references to the New World—the Puritans weren’t the only ones who came here to escape religious persecution, you know. The Salem witches have been popularized, but there were countless others. At any rate, as the years passed, I began to pick up oddments and arcana about the city. It became a hobby of sorts. There are lots of places to look for the information— the trick is knowing where. Why, the stories I could tell you …”

  “I can imagine. That’s why I’m here, Dr. Carter. And I would also like to ask you a favor.”

  “Anything, my dear Ms. Marsden.”

  “Do you think we could find Train 93?”

  Carter smiled impishly and studied the smoke curling off the end of his cigarette for a moment. “What a fascinating idea! But who is ‘we’?”

  “Well, you and I, I suppose.” Lya paused, thinking quickly. “And … and I know someone on the police force. He might be able to help us.”

  “That wouldn’t be the good Lieutenant Corvino, would it?”

  Lya blushed, and allowed herself to laugh. “Oh, that’s right, you already know Michael. I’m sorry—I forgot.”

 
“No need to be embarrassed. Yes, I’ve worked with Detective Corvino and others in the police department on occasion. I’m quite certain something could be worked out.”

  “You mean you would help us look for it?”

  “Why not? It sounds like a wonderful diversion. It’s good to get away from all this stuffiness once in a while, don’t you think?” Lane Carter gestured about his office casually.

  “Oh, I’m sure it is.” Lya felt suddenly uncomfortable as Carter stared at her. She was not sure where to lead the conversation next. “Do you think we’ll have trouble with the Transit Authority?”

  “I doubt it. In a bureaucracy like that, as long as you can find someone to approve the request to ramble around in their tunnels, no one else will ever find out.” Carter laughed lightly, as though enjoying some private joke.

  “Well, I do know the director of public relations down at the Jay Street offices,” said Lya. “He might be able to help.”

  “Good. Then you’ll take care of the legwork on this, and let me know when we can start poking around in the dark?”

  “Yes, that will be fine.” Lya paused and removed her portable cassette recorder from her bag. “But there are a few other things I’d like to ask you before I go. Do you mind if I tape your responses?”

  “Not at all,” said Carter. “Play on!”

  Depressing the record button, Lya placed the recorder on top of a stack of books near the corner of the desk. “Dr. Carter, you told me before that there are many bizarre things buried beneath the streets of New York City. Could you elaborate on a few?”

  Carter grinned. “Ah, but there are more than a few. You’ve been concentrating on the city’s subway system, which is a twentieth-century phenomenon, but did you know that New York had a subway in the planning stages as early as 1849? And that they actually had one in operation in 1870?”

  “You’re kidding,” said Lya.

  “Not at all! A marvelously inventive man named Alfred Eli Beach published an article in The Scientific American in 1849 that outlined his vision of a subway system under the city. His original plan called for railway cars to be pulled under the streets by teams of horses, but he gave that up when he embraced the idea of pneumatic power.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Air pressure and vacuum effect. You see, Beach initially invented a system of tubes and canisters that would be installed underground, running from building to building, as a mail delivery system. You put your letter in a can, pop it into a tube opening, and it would be sucked along to a central post office where it would be rerouted to its destination!”

  “What a wonderful idea,” said Lya. She was smiling in spite of herself, getting caught up in Carter’s enthusiasm.

  “Yes, yes, it was a wonderful idea, but Mr. Beach never got around to attempting his mail delivery system. Once he came upon the idea of pneumatic power, he began to think bigger. Why not propel subway cars through tubes with great wind machines? And so, as an experiment, he built a model of the system for the American Institute Fair in 1867. A plywood tube running the length of the 14th Street Armory carried a small car big enough for ten passengers. Beach used a helix fan at one end of the tube to blow the car down to the end of the tube and then suck it back. It was an incredible demonstration, and it proved that his system would work.”

  “This is amazing, Dr. Carter. How do you know about this? I’m sure no one’s ever heard of it.”

  “Research! Research will get you answers you never dreamed of, my dear Ms. Marsden. It’s all there in the records, the books! You just have to go find it. Anyway, to continue: the political climate in New York around 1869 was hideous, completely controlled by “Boss” Tweed, if you remember your history, and Beach knew that he would never get approval from Tweed for a subway system—unless, that is, Tweed could see a way to swindle some money from the operation. So Mr. Beach did the only thing he could do under the circumstances.”

  “And what was that?” asked Lya, smiling broadly now. “He built the subway without permission, that’s what he did! In late 1869, Beach secretly hired a work crew to tunnel three hundred and twelve feet along the length of Broadway. It took them two months, and no one ever caught them. In February 1870; Beach unveiled his subway to the public—a twenty-two-passenger car decked out as elegantly as a cruise ship’s stateroom was whisked through the tube at the unheard-of speed of twenty miles per hour! The subway was a blazing success, but it became a political football, and with the depression of the same decade, there was not enough money to fund a full project. Defeated, Alfred Beach ordered the tube sealed up and forgot about it.”

  “Whatever happened to it?”

  “A funny thing, actually. Beach and his followers weren’t the only ones to forget about his pneumatic subway. In 1912, when laborers were cutting through the bedrock to make the BMT tunnel, they broke through a wall and fell into Beach’s tube. Everything was intact, although lots of the wooden fixtures had begun to rot. The little subway car still rested on its rails, as though awaiting the next load of passengers.”

  “What did they do with it?” asked Lya.

  “They broke it all up and carted it away with the rest of the debris. A man’s dream finally smashed forever. Beach’s tube is now part of the BMTs City Hall station, and if you go down there and look on the wall you’ll find a plaque that proclaims him to be the father of the modern subway system. And probably nobody ever notices.”

  “Do you think a similar thing could have happened to Train 93? The newspaper accounts said there was a crash and an explosion. Do you think it could have been a cover-up? Could the train still be down there?”

  “Anything is possible, my dear woman. Sewer workers who were digging a new drainage trough under Wall Street around the turn of the century encountered a wall of straw-and-mud bricks. When their foreman ordered them to break it down, the first bunch of diggers tumbled through into a vast grotto. There was a huge underground pool fed by a bedrock spring, and—get this—it was populated by a species of eyeless frogs afflicted with albinism and gigantism! Imagine it: white, slimy frogs as big as cats! Oh, yes, and they were cannibals, too.” Carter smiled as he added the last fact, as though he were adding the small print to Faust’s contract. “There is much that is forbidding and full of mystery beneath our streets. I cannot stress that point enough, Ms. Marsden.” He paused to light another cigarette from the smoldering butt of his previous one.

  “Did anyone ever discover the origin of the grotto?” asked Lya.

  “No. To this day it remains a mystery, although I have my own ideas.”

  Lya willingly took the bait. “Could you elaborate on some of them?”

  Carter grinned. “I thought you’d never ask, Ms. Marsden! If you recall your history, you will remember that the Dutch settled here in 1624. One of the groups that soon followed the original settlement was a sect of Flemish cultists called the Knights of Bernardus. Bernardus was supposed to be a medieval sorcerer who created a religious faction antithetical to the rampant Catholicism of the age. They-dabbled in the dark arts, and there were rumors of satanic worship and the like. Fascinating stuff if you can find the references and are adept at reading Latin. At any rate, Bernardus was a dwarf and, by all accounts, a vile, ugly little man. Others of his ilk were drawn into his circle and soon the Knights of Bernardus became a collection of twisted, malicious little bastards living in communes throughout the Flemish countryside. The sect survived into the seventeenth century, and at least one of its fragments came to the New World around 1630.”

  “And you think the grotto was built by them?”

  “Yes, quite possibly, but not at that time. You see, Charles II decided that it was silly to not have the British flag flying virtually everywhere on the Atlantic coast, so he bestowed the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam on his brother, the Duke of York. The duke wasted no time, sailing into Manhattan with three warships and lots of soldiers. Although Peter Stuyvesant vowed he would never surrender, the rest of the
Dutch citizenry were none too interested in a lot of killing. So the British took over and the town was renamed New York. Hence our name today.”

  “But what does this have to do with what you were saying before?”

  Dr. Carter chuckled. “Oh, come now, Ms. Marsden, you know that we lecturers are long-winded. But I am getting to the point. And so, the British came to run things in New York, and one of the things they had no truck with was some of the more vocal and mystical religious sects that had sprung up in New Amsterdam. The Knights of Bernardus was one of the groups that the British constabulary determined to eradicate. After some ugly confrontations, the group of ugly little sorcerers went underground, both figuratively and literally.”

  “You mean they actually began living under the city? How?” Lya was finding this tale even more bizarre than anything he had previously told her. Evil dwarves living under New York? It was absurd. Or was it? Lya didn’t know what to think of this odd man spinning tales into her tape recorder.

  “There were already labyrinths snaking under the streets, Ms. Marsden. Wine cellars, artesian wells, primitive sewage troughs, escape tunnels from the cellars and foundations, and other odd constructions. Why, there are even catacombs under the remains of some of the city’s earliest churches. So it was not a large problem for the Knights of Bernardus to eke out an existence under the streets, coming up only to forage and steal during the dead of night.”

  “Whatever happened to them?”

  Dr. Carter shrugged. “No one seems to know. They went underground and, to all intents and purposes, disappeared. They may still be down there, for all we know!” Again he flashed the quizzical smile, and cocked one eyebrow. “Now, that’s a thought, isn’t it?”

  Lya nodded, and urged him to relate some other tales. Carter complied, and the minutes quickly sped by. Lya was fascinated with the material she was gathering, and couldn’t wait to play her tapes for her producer. Dr. Carter would be a big hit for one of the evening interviews. His dramatic personality would translate very well in front of the television cameras. Her audiences would love him.