The thing on the rock must have noticed Ralphie, for it turned away from the cause of its agonies long enough to look down at him with fierce white eyes. It regarded him with a coldness, a calmness, that seemed to say: So, one of you has come at last…
Ralphie looked into its eyes, human and yet inhuman, seeing the eons of suffering, the millennia of pain and loneliness. And deep within the eyes, he could also see the disillusionment, the brooding coals of hate and retribution waiting to be fanned to flame. A sensation of betrayal radiated from those monstrous eyes, and Ralphie felt a bond with the tortured body on the rock. Watching it, Ralphie saw it change. It was less amorphous now; a head and a face vaguely appeared. The emotions in its eyes seemed to alter. When the bird swung its beak roughly into the creature’s gut once again, it flinched, but there was no sound of agony, no pain in its eyes, which remained fixed upon Ralphie.
Set me free, said the eyes, and I shall right the wrongs.
Ralphie understood, nodding, almost smiling.
Slowly he approached the bird-thing on its perch, seeing that it was almost equal in size to himself, that it could tear him to ribbons with its razorlike talons. A man would normally fear this mythic thing, but Ralphie was beyond fear. He had peered into the eyes of the one on the rock, sharing the greatest pain, the hate and betrayal. Ralphie could feel these things pulsing from the chained one, as they had for untold ages. It raged to be free upon the world that had twisted its gift, forgotten its sacrifice.
Ralphie stepped closer, his left foot sliding along the cavern floor.
Hearing the sound, the bird paused, turning its skullish head and cocking it to the side to regard the odd little creature that stood below it. As it watched, Ralphie bent to pick up a fist-sized rock. In one motion he stood and hurled it at the bird’s head, striking one of its great yellow eyes, puncturing it like the delicate yolk of an egg. The bird screamed as its empty socket oozed, then launched itself upward with a furious beating of its thick wings. It shrieked again as it hovered for a moment above Ralphie; then it rose up into the darkness, leaving only the echo of its wings smacking the dead air.
Once again, Ralphie looked up at the thing chained on the rock, transfixed by the sight of the ravaged entrails, the stains on the rocks below where the excesses of torture had dripped for centuries. Stepping forward, he touched one of the chains; it was hot to the touch. There was a large pin holding the chain to a hasp cut into the rock, and Ralphie pulled on it. He heard a chinking sound as the chain fell free, and the great figure with the speaking eyes now surged against the remaining bonds. The wailing had been replaced by a gathering storm of excitement and power, filling the cavern with a terrible static charge.
Ralphie reached up and loosed another pin; the chain fell away from the harnessed body as the creature moved against the final two restraints. It gave out a great cry—a cry born of humiliation and defeat; but now it was almost free. The cavern walls shook from the force of the cry and the remaining chains exploded in a shower of metallic fragments.
Ralphie backed away, for the first time awed by the power he had unleashed. He saw that the figure had changed into something dark and nameless. For an instant the thing’s eyes touched him and he felt immediately cold. Then there was an eruption of light and a roll of thunder. Ralphie was thrown hack by the force as the thing leaped from its prison-rock, past him and into the darkness.
The blackness of eternal night and a bone-chilling cold settled over Ralphie as he lay on the cavern floor. He knew where the thing was going, knew what terrible lessons would be wrought upon the dead souls. All the centuries of twisted vision would be changed. His thoughts were coming slower and his limbs were becoming numb as he surrendered to the chilling darkness. He knew that he was going to fall asleep, despite the rumblings in the earth, despite the choirlike screams rising up from the depths of the cavern.
And when he awoke, he was not surprised to find himself upon a rock, bound by great chains of silver light, spread-eagled and suspended above the cavern floor. The air was filled with the smells of death and decay, of unrelenting pain, but he did not care.
Out of the darkness, up from Gehenna, there came a deliberate flapping sound—the sound of wings beating heavily against the darkness. Looking into the shadowy regions of the cavern, Ralphie searched for the source of the sound, which he could hear moving closer, and closer.
At last he saw it coming toward him. For him.
The skull-like head, the beak, and the one good eye.
CHAPTER 21
MARSDEN
The next two days were very strange indeed.
It had been agreed upon by Michael, Lya, and Professor Carter that the report given to both the NYPD and the Transit Authority say nothing more than whatever facts could be substantiated. Michael had been against this initially, but Lya and Carter had convinced him that any mention of the star-stone, the missing train, or the strange noises they’d heard would be met with strong skepticism, if not wholesale disbelief. The official report therefore had been simple: while they were touring the subway tunnels near the Bleecker Street station, there had been a cave-in of an old spur-line tunnel, and Mr. Frieter had been trapped in the debris. The incident had received minimal play in the newspapers, although the evening news channels all carried the story because of Lya’s notoriety. Maintenance crews from the Transit Authority and the Fire Department worked through the night and into the next day, clearing the rubble from the spur-line tunnel, and found nothing for their efforts—neither Mr. Frieter nor Train 93. One news team deemed the accident a “freak occurrence,” blaming it on the brief earthquake that had touched Manhattan the evening before. Earthquakes were extremely rare on the East Coast, said one newscaster, and even rarer along the northeast coastline, but New York City had registered a small tremor with a reading of 2.8 on the Richter scale. Mr. Richard Frieter of the Transit Authority had been the only casualty.
On the second evening after their discovery of the missing subway train, Professor Carter called a meeting in his apartment off Washington Square. Michael picked up Lya in a cab on his way from the precinct, and they rode the distance in silence while the taxi driver rattled on about the surprising success of the New York Giants.
Lane Carter lived in an old building adjacent to NYU. It was well maintained, but had no elevator. Lya and Michael walked up the three flights holding hands, wondering what would happen next. He knocked on the door and waited.
“Who is it?” called Carter.
“It’s us, Lane.”
The door opened into a large living room filled with bookcases and glass-doored display cabinets. There was an old couch along the one open wall, a cluttered coffee table, and a large, naughahyde recliner with a reading lamp beside it. The room was filled with oddments, stacks of books, exam booklets, notebooks, and empty, unwashed coffee mugs. The place presented a general appearance of comfortable disarray. “Come in,” said Carter, who was wearing dark pants, an open-necked white shirt, and a red velvet smoking jacket. “I’ve got to talk to both of you.”
Carter seemed different to Lya. His eyes were lackluster and there was not the slightest hint of that impish grin at the corners of his mouth. His tone of voice was somber and even, and he displayed no trace of his usual enthusiasm.
“What are we going to do now?” asked Lya, taking a seat next to Michael on the couch.
Carter lighted a cigarette and collapsed into his reading chair. “That is precisely what we must discuss, Lya. I have been doing some thinking about all that has happened, about what we have seen, and what we have merely deduced. I have also done some research, and I have reached some very frightening conclusions. But before I begin, I would like to know what your feelings are on all of this. What shall we do—continue our cover-up? Forget about everything? Or do we press on, go further into these mysteries?”
“I don’t know …” said Lya. Her mind was full of so many unanswered questions, so many confusing facts and theories. “I don’t k
now what we should do.”
“Lieutenant?”
“Well, to tell you the truth, Lane, I’m getting a little freaked out by all this. That stone of yours, that crystal … I can’t believe it, even though I’ve seen it. I mean, what is it? What the hell are we playing around with?”
“I have some ideas …”
“But doesn’t it scare you, too?” asked Lya.
Carter tried to smile and failed. “Oh, yes, it frightens me. But I feel that we must continue nonetheless. But I want to hear how you two feel about things.”
“There’re a few other things we should take into consideration,” said Michael. “I don’t know if you’ve been reading the papers or heard any of the follow-ups on the Peake case—the Subway Slasher—or not …”
“Only what I’ve heard at the station,” said Lya.
Lane Carter shook his head, gesturing at the stacks of books all over the room.
“Well,” Michael continued, “the general consensus is that he’s your standard paranoid schizophrenic. They still have him over at Bellevue, and it looks like he’s going to get an insanity verdict. But according to my partner, John Provenza, he has said some things that might be of interest to us. Things that were ignored by the psychiatrists and the interrogating officers.”
“Like what?” asked Lya.
“Peake told them that he ‘sees things’ down in the subways. Things that look like big amoebas and hang onto the trains and crawl around. He says they live in the tunnels. He also told Provenza that there are a bunch of ‘little men’ who live underground, and that—”
“Little men?” asked Carter, his eyebrows raised slightly.
“The Knights of Bernardus!” said Lya.
“What’s that?” Michael looked from one to the other.
“Could it be, Professor?” Lya sat forward on the edge of the couch massaging her hands nervously.
“Interesting, very interesting. You see, Lieutenant, there is some historical precedent for what you are telling us.”
“What do you mean?”
Lane Carter briefly recounted the history of the Knights of Bernardus, mentioning that the majority of their number were dwarves.
“Christ, could it be possible? After all this time?” Michael rubbed his face with one hand.
“It appears that almost anything is possible, doesn’t it?” asked Carter. “Did this fellow Peake say anything else about the little men?”
“He says their skin is almost pure white, and he believes they talked to him with their minds. Peake says that they approved of what he was doing—all the killing. He says they liked it.”
“Did he actually see them, or do you think he’s delusional?” asked Lya.
“Probably a combination of both,” said Michael. “But when you figure what we’ve seen ourselves, it doesn’t really surprise me, you know? But there’s more. When I was talking to Provenza about this, he told me something very interesting —he’s seen one of those little guys himself.”
“What?” said Carter. “Explain.”
Corvino told them both of Provenza’s experience in the subway station, and how he had forced the train to stop and pull back but found nothing. The only reason John had admitted anything was because he had been forced to explain why he had stopped a train in his nightly report.
“Understandable,” said Carter. “No one wants to admit to seeing little men running around.”
“And that’s the funny thing,” said Michael. “You can ask any policeman who’s worked this city for a while—they’ll all tell you the same kinds of stories. Whenever they have to confront any of the street people—you know, the bag ladies, the rum-bums, the rag-men, even some of the junkies—they all get stories about ‘little men.’ Little men in the sewers, little men in the access tunnels of the New York Steam Company— that’s where a lot of the bums sleep in the winter because the steam pipes keep the tunnels warm. The police have been hearing stories about strange stuff under the streets for a long, long time. We never paid any attention because those types are all such loony tunes in the first place.”
“And as it turns out, perhaps we should have listened to some of them,” said Carter. “Interesting. It certainly is.”
“There’s more,” said Michael. “Something that has the guys down at the precinct completely whipped.” He paused, shook his head. “All right, listen to this,” he said finally. “The other night, the same night we caught the Slasher as a matter of fact, an inspector from the Department of Sewers, a guy by the name of Jefferson Dubois, gets called down to Little Italy. There’s a report that something is backed up in the drains and the smell is coming up through the kitchens of one of the restaurants down there, driving all the customers out. He goes down there with a couple of his crew. They waited for him while he went down into the drains to look around, but he never came back.”
“What do you mean—‘never came back’? What happened to him?” asked Carter.
“When he didn’t show, his crew went down looking. What they found doesn’t make any sense. Dubois had been killed by something that nobody can figure out. All that was left of him was his skeleton and a few scraps of clothing, some metal from his belt buckle, his keys, and some coins. Everything else was just gone. When they went farther up into the drains, they found another body, yet to be identified, in the same condition. The coroner figures that the second body had been there awhile, and its decomposition had caused the odors in the restaurant. But that was before something went over both bodies like acid and stripped all the meat off their bones.”
“Could it have been acid?” asked Lya.
“That was one of the first ideas,” said Michael. “That maybe somehow, some kind of nasty industrial solvent got washed into the drains and Dubois got caught in it. But the medical examiner couldn’t find any traces of chemicals on the remains. He did say that some of the bones were abraded, like with a file or something rough. The strangest part is that Dubois couldn’t have been down there more than fifteen minutes at the most, and nobody can figure out what could reduce a man to a skeleton in that short amount of time and not leave a trace …”
“What indeed?” said Carter. “And you think this may have some connection with our own findings?”
“I don’t know what to think, Professor. I just figured we ought to take into account anything that might be relevant.”
“Maybe we should take all that we know to … somebody,” said Lya. “The police commissioner, or the mayor, or—oh, I don’t know.”
“But would they believe us?” asked Carter. “I doubt it very strongly. Logically, what we have discovered makes no sense. It’s in a class with Bigfoot and flying saucers. No, I think we should keep silent for the moment at least, until we have more solid evidence.”
“Do you have any suggestions, any ideas?” asked Michael. Carter lighted another cigarette and inhaled deeply; then his gaze flicked rapidly between Lya and Michael. “Yes, I do, and that’s the real purpose of this meeting. I believe that we have stumbled upon something very important. There is something very complex going on beneath the streets of this city, something very old and not completely of our reality. That is, what we perceive to be reality.”
“Can you be a little more specific, Lane?” Michael sat up and stared at the professor.
“All right,” said Carter. “Have you ever heard of the term megapolisomancy?”
“I can’t even pronounce it,” said Michael. “What’re you talking about?”
Carter nodded grimly. “Megapolisomancy. It is an intricate mystical theory created by an early-twentieth-century occultist named Thibaut de Castries, who wrote a book by that title. His work is full of fascinating ideas. The word loosely translates as ‘the black-magic of cities,’ but it involves many concepts. De Castries believed that as cities grow older and more defined, they assume a metaphysical life of their own, attracting some of nature’s more ethereal life forms—spirits, demons, and other nebulous beings. That ties in with wha
t I have recently been thinking.”
“How so?” asked Lya. The ideas seemed wild, almost absurd, but after what she had already witnessed, she wasn’t so inclined to dismiss them out of hand.
“Well,” said Carter, “take our missing train, for example. It had vanished from our world, but to where? To that place where we entered, yes, but where was that? Let us suppose that there are indeed lines of force crisscrossing the globe, and that some of them intersect beneath the streets of Manhattan, some of them at the exact places our subway rails have been run. If the ideas of de Castries and others carry any weight, then perhaps the focal points of these ‘ley-lines’ are not only concentrations of power, but also interdimensional holes.”
“Holes?” asked Michael.
“Yes, think of it! Doors into other worlds … places where things from our world—and theirs—have equal access to one another!”
“You mean that the subways may be like a gate, an opening into … what would you call them? Other dimensions?” asked Michael incredulously. “And that there may be beings from these other places that come into our world?”
“Exactly,” said Carter. “In effect, the city may be coming to life, and if so, it’s proving to be something quite malign.”
“But what can we do about it?” asked Lya. Even she could detect the tone of desperation in her voice.
“Several things, for openers,” said Carter. “The first step is to gather more evidence for our case. Michael, would it be possible for you to compile a list from police records of all incidents within, oh, say the last twenty years relating to anything odd—and, of course, pertaining to the city’s under-ground world? Do you think you could gain access to such records?”
Michael paused for a moment. “Probably. I have some friends down at Central. One guy I know pretty well is in administration, and I think he could help. But what am I supposed to tell him? I mean, what would I want with that kind of information?”
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