The office was at the end of the platform, on the other side of a huge pair of wooden doors that might have been taken from a library or a town hall. Tom Callaghan and Sister Wendy went in with the Johnsons. La Toyah had drifted away.
They found themselves in a large, square room filled with filing cabinets and lit by a dusty chandelier. A red carpet – shabby and frayed – lay stretched out on the polished wooden floor. An ornately framed picture of Donald Trump, the American president, hung on one wall, with an American flag propped up in the corner. Velvet curtains hung ceiling to floor on two sides, but there were no windows. A slim, black man in a suit sat behind an oversized desk, facing the door. He was in his sixties with grizzled, silver hair and spectacles that hung crookedly on his face, mainly because he was missing one ear. The man had no lips. His teeth, quite possibly fake, were kept in place with two elastic bands that went all the way round his head.
“Come in!” he exclaimed. “Take a seat.” It was difficult to make out what he was saying. He spoke as if he were eating a meal at the same time. “I’m Obadiah Harris. And you are…?”
“Derek Johnson. My wife and daughter…”
“They came in on the J train,” Sister Wendy said.
“But they weren’t referred,” Tom Callaghan added in a low voice.
“Weren’t referred?” Obadiah Harris seemed almost amused by the thought. He waved the others away. “You can leave us together,” he said. “It looks like we may have some explaining to do.”
“And then what?” Callaghan demanded.
The man behind the desk raised his hands. He had two of them although not a full set of fingers. “We’ll work something out.”
He waited until the two of them had gone. The doors swung shot behind them. Then he examined the Johnsons. “I have to say,” he muttered. “You don’t look sick.”
“We’re not sick!” Samantha exclaimed. “There’s nothing wrong with us!”
“Then what are you doing down here?”
“We took the wrong train!”
“I don’t see how that’s…” Obadiah broke off. “Maybe you’d better start at the beginning. Where you live, what you were doing in Manhattan and how you came to take the J train. Don’t leave anything out. We’ve got plenty of time.”
Derek assumed that the man was talking to him and was about to begin, but instead it was his wife who silenced him with a scowl and then launched into an explanation that began with the legal case that her husband had won, the unwanted holiday, the Wilmott Hotel, the decision to take the subway and (although she was a little muddled about what exactly had happened and where exactly they had gone) the decisions that had brought them here.
“Oh dear, oh dear,” Obadiah Harris sighed. “This has happened before, but not for a very long time. The J train only runs once a day and at a very specific time. I’m afraid to say you people have been extremely unlucky.”
“Where are we?” Derek demanded. “What is this place? Who are all you people?”
“I’m going to tell you everything you want to know, Mr Johnson. I can understand you being upset. But please remember, we didn’t invite you here…”
“Where is here?”
“Well…” Obadiah shook his head regretfully. He had been handsome once when he was young. But for the missing ear and lips he might still be. “I’ll keep this brief because we can talk more when you’ve had a chance to get used to all this,” he began. “But somehow you’ve found your way into a community of people who, not to put too fine a word on it, are pretty sick. There are over three thousand of us living down here … living and dying because there’s plenty of that too. What we have is a disease.”
“What disease?” Samantha asked. Her eyes were wide and staring. Even as she sat there, she was trying to shrivel into herself as if she could find some protection from the air around her.
“There’s no name for it. Never has been. That’s part of the problem. Ever since it was first diagnosed – and that was more than a hundred years ago – nobody has been able to work out what causes it … or if there’s a cure. They say the first poor soul who caught it was a man called Lebowski, and there are those that would like to name it after him, not that he would have wanted the honour. He’s been dead a long time now, buried under platform nine. But it wasn’t his fault. He came from Poland and there are people who say the disease began there. Only that doesn’t make any sense because nobody in Poland has it. Nobody in Europe has it. Nobody outside Manhattan has it. Just people who live here. They catch it, they get sick and they come down here.”
“Why not go to hospital?” Samantha asked.
“No point going to hospital. You see, the disease is like a rotting sickness. I can see the way you’re all staring at my mouth. And maybe you’ve noticed my ear. Just as well you can’t see what’s happened to my stomach under this suit, but put it this way, if this was Christmas, I could hang the decorations on my ribs.” He sighed. “Once you get the disease, you just begin to rot away, one piece at a time, and there’s nothing anyone can do. And it’s worse than that. The sunlight makes it worse. It’s a bit like vampires.” He glanced kindly at Cecily. “I’m sure you’ve read about them. They go out in the daylight, they shrivel up. Well, with us, the sunshine just makes us hurt and it makes the illness quicken up and then we rot even more.”
“So you’ve come down here…”
“The authorities didn’t know what to do with us, when the sickness first broke out. They were frightened, you see, that we’d cause a panic in the city. An illness that came from nowhere and that nobody could cure? To begin with, they kept us on Blackwell’s Island just off Manhattan in the East River. Later the name changed to Roosevelt Island – but then they needed Roosevelt Island for other things so they moved us again. That was at the turn of the century, the twentieth century, when they were building the New York subway system. They found an area specially for us and we’ve been here ever since.”
“But what do you do here?” Derek demanded. “What do you do?”
“There isn’t much we can do,” Obadiah replied. “We look after each other and we look after ourselves. Occasionally, government doctors and scientists come visit, but they’ve long since given up on us. They’ve tried drugs. They’ve tried radiation. Nothing works. So they send us food and money to help us keep going, but nowadays they more or less leave us alone.”
“And the J train…?”
“That’s how new patients reach us. Of course, the New York doctors know about the disease and they recognize the symptoms. If anyone in the city gets sick with the big D, they get sent to us on the J train. We meet them and look after them just like we met you.”
“But we haven’t got the disease!” Samantha exclaimed. For the first time she was glimpsing a way out of this. “We took the J train by mistake!”
“That’s right, Mr Harris,” Derek weighed in.
“Derek…” Samantha began.
“Leave this to me, Samantha.” Derek leaned forward. “You only have to look at my wife, my daughter and me to see that we are completely healthy. We’re just tourists who happened to get onto the wrong train quite by mistake. So if you don’t want me to sue you and the people who look after you, and everyone else who knows about this totally insane situation, you’ll put us back on the J train and send us back to where we came from and maybe, if you’re very lucky, we’ll forget that any of this ever happened.”
“I’m afraid it’s not quite as easy as that, Mr Johnson,” Obadiah replied.
“Why not?”
The older man rubbed a finger across his chin. “Well, to start with, there’s the question of national security.”
“What about national security?”
“I’ve already told you. Nobody knows about this community. Nobody has heard about the disease. You seem like a reasonable man to me, sir. How do you think the people of New York would feel if they found out that there were three thousand of us down here…?”
“
I don’t give a damn about the people of New York! I never even wanted to come to New York in the first place! I’m going back to England with my family. We’re never coming back here again.”
“Well, that’s the other problem, sir…”
“Listen.” Suddenly Derek was angry. “I’ve had enough of this. I don’t want to talk to you any more. Just give me a yes or a no. Are you going to show us the way out of here?”
“Mr Johnson, you must let me explain…”
“Yes or no?”
“I can’t.”
“Then I shall take matters into my own hands!”
Derek sprang into action. He was only a small man, but he could move surprisingly fast when he really had to and he was well-built after many sessions in an exclusive, private gym near the docks in Portsmouth. In one movement he stood up, sending his chair toppling behind him, and grabbed hold of his wife.
“Come on, Samantha,” he exclaimed. “You too, Cecily. We’re getting out of here.”
“But Mr Johnson…!” Obadiah Harris half-rose to his feet but Derek pushed him back, using the palm of his hand.
Obadiah grunted in surprise. Derek grimaced. Beneath the shirt, he could feel the man’s chest and it wasn’t pleasant. It was like handling a stack of uncooked spare ribs in a butcher’s shop. Samantha muttered something but Derek spun her round and propelled her to the door, jerking it open, with Cecily right behind.
“Wait…!”
They ignored Obadiah and plunged outside. Tom Callaghan was standing right there, as if he had been listening to the conversation through the door. “What do you think —?” he began.
Derek pushed him out of the way and the man slumped onto his knees. They were out of the office. Derek stopped and looked around him … at the platform with the hospital beds, the train still standing, dark and silent on the tracks, the rock walls and broken tiles, the crowds of people shuffling around like zombies with nothing to do. He thought about the tunnel. He could see it just ahead of him, and if he followed the tracks they would surely lead him somewhere. No. It might be a mile before the next station and running through the darkness, perhaps with this mob behind him … he would never make it.
Up.
That was the only answer. They were underneath New York. But if they could just make it to the surface, there must be some way to break through to normal life. Derek could almost imagine the shoppers and the office workers streaming along the sidewalks, the cars and the cabs, a whole world going about its business with no idea of what was happening just beneath its feet. He could reach them! There had to be a way.
“This way!” he shouted, leading his family towards the nearest staircase that zigzagged along the rock face, heading up past the cave entrances and onward into the darkness.
“You can’t go up there!” A man, dressed in the rags of a police uniform, blocked his way. One half of his face was normal, unscarred. The other half wasn’t there.
Derek lashed out, knocking him aside and reached the first stairs. Samantha came next with Cecily close behind, her blonde hair sweeping across her eyes. All around them, people were shouting and pointing, more in alarm than anger or outrage. Nobody stopped them as they began to climb. The girl called La Toyah appeared at a cave entrance, blinked at them and then turned away. Another older woman with a collapsed skull shrank back against the wall to let them pass.
The staircase led them higher and higher. It was impossible to look back now. The distance was too great. If they slipped over the handrail and fell, they would surely be killed. None of them were speaking. They were having to use every effort to keep going, to force themselves on. They came to a wide metal platform with a flight of concrete steps branching off to the left, into the rock. A row of dull, yellow light bulbs lit the way and there was a metal door at the end. Derek thought he could feel a draft against his face. This had to be it – the exit. But what if the door was locked?
Someone shouted something behind them, but Derek didn’t hear a word of what they had to say. Samantha was with him, tears flowing, crying out in pain. She had twisted her ankle, losing one of her trainers at the same time. Cecily had somehow scratched her arm. There were streaks of blood all the way to her elbow. The three of them turned off and ran the last few feet to the door. It was closed with four huge bolts, but they hadn’t been fastened. Derek reached out and jerked them back. Then all three of them were tumbling forwards, throwing their combined weight against the metal door. It fell open.
Fresh air. Sunlight. Bright colours. The noise of traffic. Skyscrapers soaring over them. A hot dog stand on a corner. One page of a newspaper blowing across the sidewalk.
They were back in Manhattan, standing in an alleyway between two cross streets. In front of them was a kitchen with men in white jackets unloading cardboard boxes from a van. Behind them was the entrance to a parking lot. They could see the traffic moving at the ends of the alley on either side.
Derek slammed the metal door shut. “Come on!” he shouted. He wouldn’t feel safe until they were several blocks away. In fact he wouldn’t feel safe until they were back in Portsmouth.
Somehow they stumbled out of the alleyway, down another street and out into a wide, open area where everything seemed to be made out of glass, with two towering glass blocks looming up behind them. A woman with several shopping bags had just come out of a shop and was flagging down a cab. Derek jumped in front of her as it pulled in.
“The Wilmott Hotel!” He had to force himself not to scream.
“Excuse me…!” the woman exclaimed.
The cab driver opened his window. “I am very sorry, sir…” he began.
“I’ll pay you five times the fare to take me to my hotel,” Derek said. “In fact, I’ll pay you ten times the fare!”
It was too late anyway. Samantha and Cecily had already pushed the woman out of the way and climbed inside. Derek bundled in after them. The taxi driver shrugged apologetically and turned on the meter. Ten times the normal fare! Who was he to argue?
Nobody said anything until they had reached the Wilmott. Derek didn’t even look at the meter. When they finally pulled in, he gave the driver everything he had in his wallet and the three of them got out.
“Good afternoon, sir. Glad to have you back!”
Derek ignored the smiling doorman, registering only that it was already afternoon. How long had they been away? How many hours had their ordeal lasted? They hurried through the plush reception with its grey marble floor, scattered tables and vases of exotic flowers. They fell into the elevator and stood there, panting, exhausted, as it carried them up to their suite on the eighteenth floor. Cecily was trembling. Samantha’s make-up had run. Glancing at her, with her bright red lipstick smudged and her eye-liner running down her cheek. Derek shuddered. She reminded him of some of the people they had left behind.
Later.
Much later.
They had all showered and changed. Samantha had put antiseptic cream on Cecily’s injured arm. Derek had drunk six whiskies out of the minibar. Outside, it was getting dark. The door was locked, the security chain drawn across. Their cases were packed.
“We should go to the police,” Samantha said. She had said the same thing a dozen times before.
“We can’t go to the police,” Derek replied, patiently. The lawyer in him was taking over. For the first time in many hours he was beginning to organize his thoughts. “They’d think we were mad. They’d never believe us.”
“We could show them.”
“You think you could find that door again? It was in an alleyway but do you remember where it was? Do you even want to look? Anyway, we saw a policeman down there. You remember that? And that man, Mr Harris, said the authorities knew what was going on. For all we know, the police in this dreadful city could be in on it too.”
“I want to go home!” Cecily wailed, not for the first time.
“I know, Cece,” Derek assured her. “And that’s exactly what we’re going to do.”
&
nbsp; “Then why haven’t we left?”
“Our plane leaves tomorrow,” Derek reminded her. “We’ll leave then, just like we were going to. But don’t worry. We’re going to eat dinner in this room and we’ll have breakfast sent up too. We’re not leaving the hotel until we leave Manhattan. Then we’ve got the limousine coming for us and we’ll head straight for the terminal. We’re safe now. Nobody’s coming after us. And if anyone even tries to get through that door, then we will call the police … or the British embassy … or someone! And tomorrow we’ll fly home. Tomorrow we’ll put this whole thing behind us.”
They ate dinner together at eight o’clock, watched a little television and went to bed. Cecily was too afraid to sleep alone, so she shared the bed with her mother while Derek slept in the next room. She thought she’d be awake all night, but the whole ordeal had exhausted her and in fact she dropped off almost immediately. Her last thought was of the car that would be coming to the hotel the next day. She could already see herself sinking into the soft, leather seats. The windows were tinted. Nobody would see her as she was whisked away to the airport and the first class flight home. She would call her friend, Eleanor, as soon as she got back. But she wouldn’t tell her what had happened. She wouldn’t tell anyone. She just wanted to forget it.
She woke up.
It was a beautiful morning. The curtains were open and sunlight was streaming in. It actually hurt her eyes, it was so bright. She looked at the bed next to her. Her mother was no longer there, but she could hear talking coming from the main room.
Her arm was itching.
Idly, she reached down and scratched it. It was itching really badly. She scratched harder. Then stared in total, frozen horror at what she had just done.
She had scratched away a layer of skin and flesh. Blood was oozing out of the wound that she had just inflicted on herself. Her eyes widened. She opened her mouth – either to scream or to be sick.
Somehow she managed to prevent herself doing either. Numb with shock, she slipped out of bed, noticing for the first time the clump of blonde-coloured hair, lying on the sheet. She hadn’t noticed it before because it was concealed by the pillow.
Scared to Death--Ten Sinister Stories by the Master of the Macabre Page 19