Catacombs

by Mary Anna Evans

  “This is why I wanted to bring you with us, Faye,” Ahua said. “Those paintings look recent to me. Well, not yesterday-recent, but I don’t think they’ve been there since before World War II, which is when people were living down there. I know it’s not your specialty, but I thought you might be able to give us an idea of their age. I’d also really like to know when that door was cut into the storm drain. And why.”

  With that, he had beckoned to Ms. Kura and they had walked to the storm sewer outfall and stepped into ankle-deep water.

  * * *

  Goldsby led the way into the darkness, followed by Ahua. Faye walked behind them, then the public works engineer, Ms. Kura. Liu brought up the rear. The concrete pipe arched over their heads and the murky water splashed at their ankles.

  “Ms. Kura knows the design of these sewers backwards and forwards. She’s going to help us stay safe while we’re down here.”

  The city engineer spoke up. “Call me Patricia, please. Before we go any farther, let me remind you of something. We’ve got to be especially careful from the get-go, because we might find animals living in the stretches of pipe closest to the surface. People, too, actually. That’s more common than you’d think.”

  Ahua nodded. “Yes, and that’s not good. You have to remember that these things aren’t just designed to catch rainwater. They’re designed to catch all the rainwater. There was a family living near here who thought the storm drain would make a good tornado shelter. They’re dead now.”

  Faye felt a very slight current tugging at her ankles. On a day like today, with its zero percent chance of rain, it was hard to imagine the deadly torrent that would come during a rainstorm.

  They were making good time, so she guessed that they were far enough into the pipe to be clear of predators, animal or human. There was no hint of sunlight left, either direct or reflected. They were dependent on the headlamps attached to their safety helmets. Still, Faye was comforted to know that Liu, who was nearly twice her weight and heavily armed, had her back.

  Goldsby, by contrast, scared her a little. She was pretty sure that if she mistakenly messed up an important piece of evidence, he would beat her with it.

  Patricia didn’t seem scary, but she too might turn vengeful if Faye hurt her storm sewers.

  Ahua had given Faye a recorder to use for her narration of their expedition. “We’re walking through a large pipe, apparently recent and well-preserved,” she said as she walked.

  The five continued to walk along a pipe that slanted ever-so-slightly upward under their feet. She resumed recording. “We just passed a spot where two lateral lines entered this pipe, one on each side. Shortly after that, the main pipe took a left turn.”

  “Uh-oh,” Goldsby said, and she didn’t like the sound of it.

  He seemed to be responding to a narrowing of the pipe. They had expected this, but it was still disconcerting. It wasn’t like the new diameter was tiny. Faye, Patricia, and Ahua could still walk upright, but Goldsby and Liu now had to stoop a bit.

  “We’ll see the diameter decrease at least a couple more times before we get where we’re going,” Patricia said. “Once we get past that point, it’s hard to be sure. For one thing, the river has been re-routed several times since the old part of this system was built.”

  Faye took some deep breaths to calm herself. She was only a little claustrophobic—and in the end weren’t most people?—so she could generally get past it enough to do what she needed to do. Still, traveling for a mile in an ever-narrowing corridor was making her pulse race. Observing and recording were both calming activities, so she went back to talking to the recorder.

  “Here’s another pair of lateral lines bringing water into this main line. They’re smaller than the pipe where I’m standing, but I could get through them on my hands and knees, if I had to. I’d rather not have to, though.”

  On cue, the concrete walls around her closed in a little bit more. Technically, she could still walk upright, but the concrete was snagging on her hair and brushing against her sleeves.

  “There’s a teeny bit of good news,” she continued. “The water’s getting shallower upstream of those lateral lines. They were each bringing in more water. It barely splashes as I walk through it.”

  Patricia interrupted her to say, “Would you look at that?” The others gathered behind her to add the light of their head lamps to hers.

  In front of them, the pipe changed dramatically. It narrowed again, and it changed color and texture. They were stepping from a modern-looking concrete pipe into a very old storm sewer line, constructed of brick. Even its shape changed into something odd and unfamiliar. This sewer pipe wasn’t round. It was wider at the top than at the bottom. Faye didn’t know the technical term for this kind of pipe, but she would have said it was teardrop-shaped, only the teardrop was upside down.

  “This is old,” Liu said. “Do you think it might date to the period when people were still living underground, Dr. Longchamp-Mantooth?”

  Thrilled for her expertise to finally be useful, Faye said, “Very possibly. I’d say this brickwork looks a lot like the brickwork in the photo of the staircase underneath the Gershwin Hotel.”

  They all mumbled their agreement as they checked out the soft red clay bricks set in aging mortar. Then they ducked their heads and stepped into the odd old teardrop-shaped pipe.

  Faye reached a hand up and dragged her fingers over the rough bricks above her. This kept her from bumping her head and it helped her remember which way was up in dark, strange surroundings that were thoroughly disorienting.

  It was hard to gauge distance as her fingers bumped over the bricks, but she judged that she’d traveled the equivalent of eight or ten city blocks away from the river when Goldsby stopped again. His headlight illuminated something rectangular that had a metallic glint. It was set into the bricks at about shoulder height.

  Goldsby let out a low whistle. “That’s it. That’s the door into the room with the murals. It has to be. It’s the right size and shape, and it’s right where the city’s engineers said it would be. And, just like they said, the pipe’s still big enough that all four of us squeezed through.” He checked the pedometer on his phone. “We’ve walked almost a mile, also just like they said.”

  Patricia took a small bow. “You sound like you didn’t believe us,” she said.

  “Our people took laser measurements of the staircase and the chamber at the bottom of it and your engineers overlaid that data onto your maps,” Goldsby said. “You’re all very good at what you do. I’m not surprised.”

  “Now we’ve got to get that thing open,” Liu said. “If God is good, there will be a handle on this side and it won’t be locked.”

  God was indeed good. The five of them crowded behind Goldsby as he carefully photographed the door before turning the handle with his gloved hands. It operated a latch that screeched loud enough to make Faye worry that dust, rust, and time had left it useless.

  Goldsby banged on the handle with the heel of his hand and tried again. Then he did it again. And again.

  Finally, the sound of metal on metal echoed off the bricks surrounding them. Its squeal hurt Faye’s ears, but when the piercing sound faded, the door was open.

  Squeezing behind Goldsby so that she could look over his shoulder, she saw a room that was unmistakably the one that he had shown Faye on his phone screen. The Evidence Response Team had set up lights in the room’s doorway, illuminating the windowless space. After walking a mile in darkness that was only punctured by their headlamps, the chamber was bright enough to hurt her eyes.

  It wasn’t large, perhaps fifteen feet square. Every square inch of its walls and ceiling was painted in eye-poppingly bright colors, brimming with life. It reminded her of prehistoric cave art, even to the bold red handprints that served as a recurring motif.

  Scattered through the painted faces and flowers wer
e the symbols of many of the world’s religions. Faye saw a cross, a Star of David, and the smiling face of the Buddha. Here and there, she saw Arabic calligraphy that she presumed was associated with Islam. Among the religious symbols, she saw the faces of happy people—men, women, and children. And snaking through it all was more calligraphy, this time in English, saying over and over again, “Evil must be obliterated.”

  Faye, Patricia, and two of the FBI agents jostled each other for space, all of them trying to get a look, but Ahua hung back while they each took a turn.

  “Hey, guys. Look up,” Patricia said. “Is that electrical conduit pipe? Surely they didn’t have—”

  “You don’t think they had electricity down here?” Liu’s voice emanated from the darkness behind her. Faye stepped aside to let her see. “Of course they had electricity. At least they had it as soon as Oklahoma City got it, around the turn of the twentieth century. My grandmother said that they had electric lights when she worked down here, for sure. A Buddhist temple, too, and gambling halls. They even had rooms where they grew sprouts and mushrooms for their above-ground restaurants.”

  “Seriously?” Goldsby said, but Faye didn’t feel as doubtful as he sounded. It had been a long time since she’d been in a place that was so far outside her everyday experience. She had the sense that anything could happen here.

  This feeling extended into the past. Faye had the sense that this was a place where anything could have happened and probably did.

  “Didn’t you notice the overhead pipes in that picture of the oil stove?” Faye asked him.

  “I didn’t,” Goldsby said, and he sounded embarrassed.

  “Looked like electrical conduit to me, and maybe even water pipes, and they looked just like those.” Liu squeezed an arm past him and pointed at the chamber’s ceiling. “Look around you. Everything’s still in good shape. The people who built this were smart enough to figure out how to do things. I bet they tapped into the power lines of people who never even knew they were paying for somebody else’s lights.”

  Faye was haunted by the people who cut the hole she was peering through. She stepped back to give Patricia some space and looked at its metal-rimmed frame, designed to keep water out. The fact that real, live human beings made the fantastical choice to move underground said a lot about how bad life was for them on the surface. Faye was sort of glad to think that they’d stolen electricity from their oppressors. And this door had solved another big problem for them.

  Agent Liu kept talking, happy to reminisce about her grandmother’s stories while they stared at the bizarre chamber. “All those things—temple, laundries, mushroom farms, and all—were on the level right under the street. Which, I guess, is where we are now. Storm sewers are pretty close to the surface, right?”

  “Makes sense to me,” Ahua said. “But are you saying there were other levels?”

  “Yep,” Liu said. “The second level down was supposed to be mostly sleeping rooms. On the third level down—”

  “Oh, come on,” Ahua said. “You’re not going to tell me that they dug three levels below the ground. I never doubted that they did something like what we see here, not after I saw those photos in the paper when I was a kid—”

  “You certainly can’t doubt that now. You just saw it.”

  He actually hadn’t, because he had yet to take his turn at the door.

  “Yeah, but three levels?”

  “Not everywhere,” Liu said. “But my grandmother said there was a third level down, smaller than the rest, and that’s where the cemetery was. And another temple.”

  “Get outta town,” Faye said, hoping that her recorder had caught everything Liu had said.

  “Everybody says that when the health inspectors came down here in 1921 for a surprise inspection, it wasn’t much of a surprise. Everywhere they went, people knew they were coming before they got there. The stories all agree that they didn’t have telephones down here. So how did word go ahead of them like that?”

  “Walkie-talkies?” Patricia’s joking tone was doing a lot to distract Faye from thinking about how many tons of dirt were over their heads.

  “Very funny,” Liu said. “The inspectors believed there were ladders between levels, and my grandmother said that they were right. According to her, while the health department people were inspecting one room, somebody went downstairs and hurried to get ahead of the inspectors—”

  “Like chipmunks?” Patricia asked, still checking out the murals.

  “Yes, like chipmunks, if you want to be snarky. They’d pop up like chipmunks and warn their neighbors to be ready because the inspectors were coming. That theory argues for more than one level belowground.”

  “Or they could’ve gone upstairs and run ahead to another surface access point,” Ahua said. Liu’s snort said that she was finished arguing with nonbelievers.

  Faye resumed her conversation with the recorder. “Every inch of the walls is painted with scenes of people interacting with nature. They’re climbing trees, swimming, tending gardens, and sharing meals. There are also a lot of religious symbols. The scenes are divided by tree trunks and ivy vines. The floor is painted to resemble grass. The ceiling is sky blue and dotted with clouds. Somebody spent a lot of time down here with a paintbrush.”

  “Do you think those paintings were done eighty or a hundred years ago, while people were still living down here?”

  She paused the phone’s recorder to answer Ahua. “Gut feeling? No. They look too recent. To confirm that, I’d recommend taking some paint samples and sending them to a lab.”

  Ahua nodded and typed a note on his phone.

  “It should be possible to tell whether the paints are modern,” she said. “If there are multiple layers of paint, the bottom one would give you an idea of when the room was built. Or first painted. Even if the murals are recent, it doesn’t mean that they were painted when the room was new. I don’t think they were, because everything but the paint looks really old.”

  Goldsby said, “Good plan. I’ll make sure we get paint samples to a lab. We’ll take brick and mortar samples, too. And wood samples from the door. Now, step up and take a better look. Give me the archaeologist’s perspective. It’s incredibly useful.”

  It took Faye’s eyes a moment to fully adjust to the well-lit room and the brilliant colors on its walls. A few moments passed before she noticed that the room wasn’t completely empty. Crude wooden benches were pushed against the three walls that she could see, giving the space the feel of an auditorium, lecture hall, or church. Even the benches were painted with bright, busy images that were like camouflage. The benches blended so completely into the walls that they were hardly noticeable, and so were the objects resting on them.

  When she made the effort to focus on the benches, their straight lines took her eyes straight across the room from right to left, leading them to the only unpainted things in sight. Three cream-colored bundles rested on the benches that met in the left corner of the room.

  When Faye finally saw them, she heard the words “Oh no oh no those can’t be real” leave her in a single breath.

  But she knew they were real, even though blankets covered the children’s faces. Anyone who had ever swaddled a baby would know that these were real. One of the bodies was wrapped a bit less tightly, allowing a few locks of dark hair to escape. Those curls broke her heart.

  Faye stood there, trapped by the bodies of her companions, unable to step away and only able to look at the small, shrouded bodies. She had to resist the urge to crawl through the small opening and stumble across the room, folding the blankets back gently to reveal the faces of three young children. The FBI would have something to say about her ruining their crime scene, though, so she couldn’t hold the small bodies in her arms. She couldn’t tell them how sorry she was that someone had put them down and walked away.

  “Who would do this?”

&
nbsp; Faye heard the four words hanging in the air, then she realized that she had spoken them herself. She pointed at the bodies, because she’d said all the words that she could manage.

  Goldsby squeezed past her for a look, then backed away, shaking his head and silent. Liu did the same and had the same reaction.

  Ahua finally stepped forward to peer into the strange room. The look on his face told Faye that he had known all along that the children were here. Their bodies were the reason that a Special Agent in Charge had made the long slog from the river.

  “You already knew,” she said. “Somebody on the Evidence Response Team leaned into the room, looked hard to the right, and saw something awful.”

  Goldsby turned toward Ahua and said, “Is that true? One of my people saw this and told you?”

  Ahua said only, “Affirmative. And then I sent a team to do exactly what we just did, only they were also sweeping for bombs. When they texted to say that there really were three dead children down here, I organized this party and now here we are.”

  In the moment that the Evidence Response Team saw the bundles and realized what they were, Ahua’s investigation had become something more than an attempt to discern the motives of a bomber who was dead and gone and who was presumably working alone. It also became the investigation of a very cold case involving the deaths of three small children.

  Ahua stood looking into the painted chamber for a long moment. Finally, he was able to speak. “I have no idea who left those little bodies here. If they’re still alive, I want them in prison for the rest of their miserable lives.”

  So did Faye. She had begun the day scared and angry. Being given a chance to help find the man who had tried to kill her and everyone else in the Gershwin Hotel had felt cathartic. It had been a way to resolve that anger. But now?

  Now her anger had ripened into the kind of rage that powered holy wars. She, too, wanted the person—people?—who had done this to rot in prison until they died.