The Gargoyle Hunters

by John Freeman Gill

  Keeping a good distance away to avoid any unseen wreckage under the surface, I motored past the intact main building, from whose rooftop cupola a strange gridwork structure, almost like a small railway, arced down to the concrete landing. Around the next curve of the island, tucked back from shore among a wilderness of puffy-topped beach weeds, I spotted another, smaller building, under assault by green vines. A bit farther along, I cut the engine and glided into a marshy shallows.

  My feet were pretty well soaked already from the rain and sea slosh. I took off my shoes and jeans and hopped, shivering, into the shallow water and muck among the marsh grasses. Christ, it was cold, stingingly cold, instantly tightening the muscles of my left calf into a painful charley horse. I hauled the boat up onto the flat as best I could, sending a crowd of fiddler crabs scurrying, and looped the yellow rope and its anchor round the trunk of a scraggly tree. Boy, was I relieved to be off that goddamn water. I tugged my jeans and sneakers back on, leaving my balled wet socks in the muck among the mussels.

  I could’ve used a machete. The overgrowth on this crazy island was like the Amazon or something. As soon as I got up the beach I was confronted by a wall of those bamboo-like beach weeds, easily six feet tall and knit together by a chaos of vines. The wind racing through the stalks made a tremendous, layered shushing sound.

  Though the building wasn’t far away, getting to it was slow going. I found a fallen limb, snapped off its branches, and used it to hack an uncertain path through the forest.

  The concrete landing on the beach side of the building had collapsed. The doorway was above my head. I fought my way through the weeds and rubble and heaved a length of driftwood up to the doorway as a ramp. Grabbing the thicket of intruding plants for support, I clambered up the slant of wood and into a long, mostly empty room with a high ceiling, corrugated-steel walls, and a concrete floor. It was pretty dark in there.

  I couldn’t tell what the building had once been. There was a pile of collapsed, badly rusted lockers in one corner, and some kind of concrete ring set into the floor that looked like a scale model of the sort of ruin druids might leave behind. There were no windows. The two doorways, one on each side, were nothing more than blown-out, yawning holes, through which the outside had begun to reclaim the inside, tendrils of ivy edging around the doorframes and racing up the walls. The roof was mostly still intact. In the couple of spots where it had fallen away, the green vines that cloaked the façade were creeping across the void above me, making a trellis of the roof beams.

  Flimsy as the building’s metal walls seemed, at least they broke the wind. When I went to the far doorway to look across the island’s weed-choked interior at the main factory building, a hostile breath of air rushed up through the beach weeds and sent a chill through my whole damp body.

  Still, I stood there in the cold, unable to take my eyes off that surviving main factory building. Colossal and well past its prime, it had a tumbledown industrial grandeur about it. At ground level, two square loading bays in the side wall were sealed off with a peculiar patchwork of colored rectangles. High up on the factory’s flank, each of its several windows was covered with a corrugated plastic square the cloudy cataract green of an old man’s eyes. As day yielded to night, I saw, or thought I saw, a thing that gave me both hope and pause. A weak light seemed to seep from the window square on the far right, high up near the roof.

  That was enough for me. I jumped down from the doorway and hurried toward the factory. But I didn’t get more than a few feet in the shadow-thick bracken before I was turned back by the sheer density of the overgrowth. I doubted it was possible to penetrate the interior of this island without a machete, even by day, but it certainly couldn’t be done at night. The low moon gloomed behind a gravy of cloud, and I couldn’t risk getting caught out in this wilderness in the dark. I had to get back inside and sit tight till morning.

  44

  I AWOKE AT DAWN to an insistent flap-flapping from above, as of a broad-winged bird struggling to get in or out. Disoriented at first, I quickly recalled where I was: on the floor in the corner of that windowless building, my duffel as a pillow, hugging the blankets around me. I rolled onto my back. The anxious bird was no bird at all but a swatch of damaged roof. Invisible fingers of wind had gotten beneath a section of tar paper at the edge of a gash in the plywood and were trying their damnedest to pry it loose.

  My jacket, which I had spread out overnight on a hanging vine to dry, was only a little damp. I pulled it on over the fisherman’s sweater and went to the doorway to look across the overgrowth at the silver bulk of the factory and the glowering sky above it. The wind was fierce, hectoring the thousands of beach-weed stalks into neurotic, shushing waves of disorder. But I saw what to do next. Though the interior of the island looked every bit as impenetrable as it had last night, by the day’s first light I could now make out a narrow cement footpath curling out from below the door toward the water’s edge. I hopped down and followed it, leaning into the wind and hugging my jacket around me. The cement was a mess, with generations of plants, both dead and alive, poking through its cracks. But a path was a path. It led out to the waterfront, then followed the shore until it reached the front of the main factory building, where waves were crashing against the concrete landing, exploding into bouquets of white spray.

  The gridwork structure on the landing had looked like a railway last night for good reason: it was a railway. Two ancient, not-quite-parallel tracks arced uneasily from the loading area in front of the factory way up to a broad rectangular opening, something like the door of a hayloft, set into the wide cupola at the factory’s top. The mad crisscross of rusty beams supporting the tracks reminded me of the Statue of Liberty’s tangled insides.

  The factory’s front wall here was made of ripply steel, blotched by salt and age. But there was no ground-level entrance, just that hayloft opening at the top of the rails. So I walked around the corner and followed the long corrugated-steel side wall, the one I’d seen in the fading light yesterday evening. The wall adjoined a wide concrete loading area on which increasingly aggressive waves kept smashing. Set into the wall’s middle were those two square loading bays I’d also seen yesterday, both of them completely sealed from the inside by a colorful patchwork of wooden apartment doors, the sort you saw surrounding demolition sites all over Manhattan. Peculiar as this was, things only got stranger. The third side of the factory had no doorway at all. And access to the fourth side, which in any event had no doors, either, was blocked by the settling carcass of the adjacent, fire-ravaged building. There was no way in.

  Covering my face against the wind and sea spray, I hurried back around the factory to the front wall and stared up at that hayloft opening at the top of the rails. I began to climb.

  My progress was slowed by the wind. The higher I rose, the stronger and sneakier its gusts became, slipping between me and the creaking gridwork and trying to fling me down to the concrete. I found if I moved closer to the façade, the factory’s bulk acted as something of a windbreak. I told myself this wasn’t much tougher than climbing a jungle gym, so long as I took my time. The rusted metal was scrapy against my palms, staining them orange-brown, and I had to keep wiping them off on my jeans. But there were enough diagonal supports running between the crossbeams that I was rarely without a good hand- or foothold.

  Near the top, I paused for breath. Directly over my head, above the cupola’s wide hayloft door, a shiny black metal crane arm extended upward from the façade on a diagonal, the tallest thing on the island. A braided cable ran its length, over a pulley at its tip, and then down to a dangling ball and hook. It put me in mind of a giant fishing rod with its lure reeled in. Except for one detail: a thin copper wire, tarnished chalky green like the grounding wire connecting our bungalow’s lightning rod to the earth, ran from the base of the crane arm down the front of the building. I guessed that it, too, was a grounding wire. And in all likelihood, it was this crane that I had seen get struck by lightning yesterday
morning.

  I climbed the last few feet to the top of the railway. The cupola opening was closed. Blocked from the inside by a wall of hard metal. I gave the metal a push, first with my hands and then with my shoulder, really putting my back into it. Nothing doing. It was completely immovable.

  A small clanking metallic sound was coming from inside the factory. Something intermittent and unreliable. At least I thought so. It was hard to be sure above the creaking whine of the wind harassing the gridwork beneath me.

  Before starting down, I made the mistake of allowing myself to take a look around. From down there on the water last night, motoring closer, this island had seemed at least somewhat substantial. But from up here, in the first grim light of day, there was no escaping how raw and exposed it was, how tiny in this vast bowl of angry water. Over my left shoulder, the mainland was nothing more than an unhelpful gesture on the horizon. On my right, coming this way, was some seriously pissed-off sky, chalkboard gray and seething. The storm was already turning the bay to ocean, all surge and roil. I got the hell down.

  The collapsing carcass of the adjacent factory building had bulged out over the years to clutter the space between the two structures with rusty debris. I decided to go around, following the broken cement path that had brought me here. It continued along the water before cutting inland, hugging the far side of the wrecked building. Here, too, though, the great carcass had bulged out as it settled, blocking the path and forcing me to walk inside the destroyed structure. It was a terrible feeling. The whole damn place was a hard-hat zone, a precarious rusty wilderness overhead. Steel ribs and pipes and catwalks haphazardly intertwined. Railings and ducts and machinery tumbling in slow motion across the decades.

  The sky began throwing down rain, hard-dropped and insistent, straight through the open roof. I kept moving. At the far side, three blocky redbrick monoliths stood in a row. Furnaces or boilers, I guessed, at least fifteen feet high. Each was girdled with bands of rusted steel. Amid all the wreckage overhead and on all sides, these structures seemed unusually sturdy, the sort of things the most cautious of the three little pigs might’ve put up as matching beach houses for himself and his two less responsible siblings. I didn’t really get how these furnaces worked—what exactly all the wheels and hatches and porthole-like doors set into their brick walls were for—but they seemed basically to be giant chimneys. On a low platform between two of the furnaces were the rusted remains of a bunch of horizontal cylinder-looking contraptions whose sides bore the words UNION STEAM PUMP COMPANY. There were weeds growing out of them.

  I picked my way through the last piles of smashed machinery and emerged outside, where I rejoined the cracked cement path. Cutting through an otherwise impassable forest of wind-whipped stalks and vines, it traveled inland a bit before splitting in two, one branch continuing across the interior of the island, the other making a sharp left. I took the left turn, but the rustling tangle of vegetation pressing in on either side was no less wild here. Spiky vines grabbed at the arms of my jacket, and I couldn’t see more than a few feet ahead of me.

  I was thinking about turning back to find shelter when I began to feel a sense of space up ahead, of widening out. But it wasn’t just that. There was an unsettling feeling of transgression, too—mine or another’s—a sense of intruding upon something terribly, terribly private. I pushed on, beating back vines from my face, catching glimpses up ahead of something dark and delicate, foreign and yet familiar, until all at once the path opened up onto a broad clearing of bright white sand. At its center, resplendent in a fresh coat of green paint, stood an ornate, fully intact, glass-and-iron IRT subway kiosk.

  I’d never seen one in person—they’d vanished from the city when I was small—but there was no mistaking it. A sturdy yet intricate confection, the kiosk wore a high, sloping four-sided iron cap decorated with a fish-scale pattern and a couple of finials on top. Its glass side was adorned with two gold-leafed words: ENTRANCE, and just below it, in smaller letters, DOWNTOWN.

  The sand surrounding the kiosk was so unblemished—not a twig, not a strand of seaweed—that it looked as if it had recently been raked clean. Beyond it, though, the clearing was ringed round with the same unruly vegetation as the rest of the island. To my left, looming not far behind these weeds, was the back wall of the sealed silver factory.

  Daylight was seeping more rapidly into the sky, even as the rain came down harder, stinging my face. I hurried across the clearing, my sneakers sinking into the sand, and entered the kiosk beneath its elegant glass canopy, which was supported by a pair of swirly cast-iron brackets. Up close, you could see the trauma the kiosk had suffered during demolition. Much of its surface beneath the green paint was marred with thick scars, welded seams where the wounds from sledgehammers and cutting torches had been healed over. All the glass here must be new, it occurred to me.

  The crumbly stone stairs inside were much narrower than the kiosk, probably half the width of a subway staircase. I wondered what kind of structure had originally stood here above these steps, what sort of service building or factory office.

  I followed the old stairs down toward the factory, taking care not to slip on the sand, loads of which had blown inside. There was no railing, just a rough stone wall. The steps led down into a dark, humid basement. Wooden pallets lined one of the walls, piled high with big empty paper sacks, their bottom edges stitched shut with heavy string. Something crunched beneath my sneakers. I kneeled down in the weak column of daylight at the foot of the stairs and discovered that the basement floor was covered, wall to wall, with thousands of the tiniest fish bones I’d ever seen.

  It got tougher to breathe the farther into the basement I penetrated. There was a soggy thickness to the air that was hard to take into my lungs. It was a relief to see another stone staircase a ways down on my right. This one went up.

  A thin wash of light spilled down the stairwell, but far too little for comfort. I climbed the steps cautiously, twisting up out of the darkness, not trusting the rotting wooden railing in my hand. After a time, this loose railing gave way to a sturdier metal one, which guided me up, up, and around, until at last I emerged through a lavishly ornamented wrought-iron gate into the cavernous, dimly lit factory building.

  I had to step back. My hand on the railing once again for reassurance, I stood on the top stair and craned my neck to take in the full, jaw-dropping scale of the place. There were no interior walls. It was just a single, colossal room, with virtually nothing to interrupt the gulf of dark space between the cement floor and the pitched corrugated-steel roof that rose and rose and rose some more to a point more than fifty feet above my head. The sound of the rain pelting that huge roof was deafening.

  Small pockets of light wavered throughout the factory just above the floor, given off by glass camping lanterns resting on wedge-shaped stone blocks. I kneeled down to inspect the block closest to me and was startled to discover it wasn’t just any old stone block but a tenement keystone, and not just any old tenement keystone but the noseless, squirrel-cheeked lady with the crooked smile my father and I had dug out of the rubble down on Second Avenue. The one I thought looked like my Woolworth’s waitress.

  The next stone block, deeper into the factory, was carved with a face I didn’t recognize, a mischief-eyed bon vivant with grapes for hair. Beneath the swaying flame of the camp lantern, his narrow nose cast a long shadow on his chin, flicking back and forth across his dimple like an unsteady metronome. The keystone after that, also topped with a lantern, was the toothless lion we’d unearthed near East Twenty-Seventh, and farther into the room still was the smirking bar-brawler with the bandaged head we’d pried from the wall and hugged onto that kid’s bunk bed together in that West Eighty-Eighth Street brownstone. Every one of these stone carvings, all the familiar ones, I could’ve sworn I’d seen Dad or Zev boxing up to ship to clients.

  There was a raised plywood platform in the middle of the factory, bounded by a fancy railing. On the side nearest me, I saw as
I drew closer, the platform was held aloft by the three stone ladies I’d seen on their backs in Dad’s studio, the ones he said were paying the brownstone mortgage. I could tell these were the same caryatids because the one in the middle was unmistakably the lady whose eye I’d seen Zev scrubbing with a toothbrush. Her face and left breast were still stained with that spill of acid rain.

  My eyes were starting to adjust to the factory’s murky light, which was growing slowly, almost imperceptibly, brighter. Through the space between two of the caryatids, I spotted a set of wooden stairs spiraling upward on the far side of the platform. I walked around and saw that this was the richly carved oak staircase from that Hell’s Kitchen church, the one that led up to the pulpit I’d helped restore, the one Dad said he was fixing up to return to the archdiocese. I climbed up the creaking steps to the pulpit, where two stacked milk crates provided a final big step up to the plywood platform. I took that step.

  There was nobody up here. Just a crappy sheetless mattress with a squiggle of sloughed-off sleeping bag and an embroidered souvenir pillow, ripped along one seam, depicting that famous Cloisters tapestry of a unicorn trapped inside a circular fence. Scattered around the mattress were wads of Kleenex, along with an open can of Carnation condensed milk and a bowl with a few dried Cheerios clinging to the inside. A year-old calendar from the Franklin Savings Bank hung, crookedly, from a protrusion in the railing’s ornament.

  Something about that railing looked familiar. I peered more closely at its curving, violin-patterned filigree until it dawned on me that this was the very bronzework rail I’d seen in the Times, the irreplaceable Carrère and Hastings design swiped from the bridge on Ninety-Sixth and Riverside.