Luckily, in fact, Father was no longer alive; he could not really be reached, I thought with relief, and saw in front of me the black row of railway carriages ready to depart.
I got into one of them, and the train, as if it had been waiting for me, slowly started to move, without a whistle.
Through the window the great valley, filled with dark rustling forests – against which the walls of the Sanatorium seemed white – moved and turned slowly once again. Farewell, Father. Farewell, town that I shall never see again.
Since then, I have travelled continuously. I have made my home in that train, and everybody puts up with me as I wander from coach to coach. The compartments, enormous as rooms, are full of rubbish and straw, and cold drafts pierce them on gray, colorless days.
My suit became torn and ragged. I have been given the shabby uniform of a railwayman. My face is bandaged with a dirty rag, because one of my cheeks is swollen. I sit on the straw, dozing, and when hungry, I stand in the corridor outside a second-class compartment and sing. People throw small coins into my hat: a black railwayman’s hat, its visor half torn away.
Far Below
Robert Barbour Johnson
Robert Barbour Johnson was an American writer who wrote six stories for Weird Tales, of which ‘Far Below’ (1939) became one of the most popular ever published in the magazine. Not much is known about Johnson, except that he called himself ‘the Outsider’ and was listed as one of the younger writers for Weird Tales. ‘Far Below’ name-checks H. P. Lovecraft and reflects the influence of the story ‘Pickman’s Model.’ Although some aspects of the story haven’t dated well, it is still powerful and strange, conveying some of the same sense of awe and horror as ‘The Night Wire’ by H. F. Arnold.
With a roar and a howl the thing was upon us, out of total darkness. Involuntarily I drew back as its headlights passed and every object in the little room rattled from the reverberations. Then the power-car was by, and there was only the ‘klackety-klack, klackety-klack’ of wheels and lighted windows flickering past like bits of film on a badly connected projection machine. I caught glimpses of occupants briefly; bleak-eyed men sitting miserably on hard benches; a pair of lovers oblivious to the hour’s lateness and all else; an old bearded Jew in a black cap, sound asleep; two Harlem Negroes grinning; conductors here and there, too, their uniforms black splotches against the blaze of car-lights. Then red tail-lamps shot by and the roar died to an earthquake rumble far down the track.
‘The Three-One Express,’ my friend said quietly, from the Battery. ‘On time to the minute, too. It’s the last, you know – until nearly dawn.’
He spoke briefly into a telephone, saying words I could not catch, for the racket of the train was still in my ears. I occupied the interval by staring about me. There was so much to be seen in the little room, such a strange diversity of apparatus – switches and coils and curious mechanisms, charts and graphs and piles of documents; and, dominating all, that great black board on which a luminous worm seemed to crawl, inching along past the dotted lines labeled ‘49th Street,’ ‘52nd Street,’ ‘58th Street,’ ‘60th…’
‘A new wrinkle, that!’ my friend said. He had put down his phone and was watching the board with me. ‘Lord! I don’t dare think what it cost to install! It’s not just a chart, you know. It actually records! Invisible lights – the sort of things that open speakeasy doors and rich men’s garages. Pairs of them spaced approximately every twenty-five yards along five miles of subway tunnel! Figure that out on paper, and the total you’ll get will seem hardly believable. And yet the city passed the appropriation for them without a murmur. It was one of the last things Mayor Walker put up before his resignation. “Gentlemen,” he said to the Finance Board, “it doesn’t matter what you think about me! But this measure must go through!” And it did. There wasn’t a murmur of protest, though the city was almost broke at the time…What’s the matter, man? You’re looking queer.’
‘I’m feeling queer!’ I said. ‘Do you mean to say the thing goes that far back? To Walker’s time?’
He laughed. It was a strange laugh, that died eerily amid the dying echoes of the train far down the tunnel.
‘Good Lord!’ he gasped. ‘To his time – man, Walker hadn’t served his first term as mayor when this thing started! It goes back to World War days – and even before that. The wreck of the train, I recall, passed as a German spy plot to keep us from going in with the Allies. The newspapers howled bloody murder about alleged “confessions” and evidence they claimed they had. We let ’em howl, of course. Why not? America was as good as in the war anyhow, by then. And if we’d told the people of New York City what really wrecked that subway train – well, the horrors of Chateau-Thierry and Verdun and all the rest of them put together wouldn’t have equaled the shambles that rioting mobs would have made of this place! People just couldn’t stand the thought of it, you know. They’d go mad if they knew what was down here – far below.’
The silence was worse than the roar had been, I thought – the strange echoing, somehow pregnant silence of empty vastness. Only the ‘drip, drip’ of water from some subterranean leak broke it – that and the faint crackling noise the indicator made as its phosphorescent crawling hinted at ‘68th Street,’ ‘72nd,’ ‘78th…’
‘Yes,’ my friend said slowly. ‘They’d go mad if they knew. And sometimes I wonder why we don’t go mad down here – we who do know, and have to face the horror down here night after night and year after year – I think it’s only because we don’t really face it that we get by, you know, because we never quite define the thing in our own minds, objectively. We just sort of let things hang in the air, you might say. We don’t speak of what we’re guarding against, by name. We just call it “Them,” or “one of Them,” you know – take Them for granted just as we took the enemy overseas, as something that’s just down here and has to be fought. I think if we ever really did let our minds get to brooding on what they are, it’d be all over for us! Human flesh and blood coldn’t stand it, you know – couldn’t stand it!’
He brooded, staring out into the tunnel’s darkness. The indicator crackled faintly on the wall. ‘92nd Street,’ ‘98th,’ ‘101st…’
‘Beyond 120th Street things are pretty safe,’ I heard my friend’s voice as I watched. ‘When the train reaches that point you’ll see a green light flash “all clear,” though that doesn’t mean absolute safety, you understand. It’s just what we’ve established as the farthest reach of Their activities. They may extend them at any time, although so far They haven’t done so. There seems to be something circumscribed about their minds, you know. They’re creatures of habit. That must be what it is that’s kept Them in this one little stretch of tunnel, with all the vast interlocking network of New York’s subway system to rove in if they chose. I can’t think of any other explanation, unless you want to get into the supernatural and say it’s because they’re “bound” to this particular locality, by some sort of mystic laws; perhaps because it’s lower than the other tunnels – chiseled far down into the basic bedrock of Manhattan, and so near to the East River you can almost hear the water lapping on quiet nights. Or maybe it’s just the awful dankness of the tunnel here, the fungoid moisture and miasmic darkness that suits Them. At all events they don’t come up anywhere else except along this stretch. And we’ve got the lights, and the patrol cars, and three way-stations like this one, with ten men on constant duty from dark till dawn – oh yes, my boy! It’s quite a little army I command down here in the night watches – an army of the Unburied Dead, you might say; or an army of the Eternally Damned.
‘I’ve actually had one of my men go mad, you know! Two others had to be placed in sanitariums for a while, but they got over it and are serving here still. But this fellow – well, we had to machine-gun him down like a dog finally, or he’d have got one of us! That was before we got the “dark lights” placed, you see, and he was able to hide out in the tunnel for days without our being able to find him. We’d hear hi
m howl sometimes as we patrolled, and see his eyes shining just as Their eyes do in the darkness; so we knew that he was quite “gone.” So when we finally ran him down we killed him – just like that. No bones made about it. “Put-put-put!” and that was the end. We buried him down in the tunnel, too, and now the trains run over him as he lies. Oh, there was nothing irregular about the business! We filled out full Departmental reports, and got the consent of his relatives, and so on; only we just couldn’t take the poor fellow above-ground and run risks of people seeing him before interment. You see, there were certain…alterations. I don’t want to dwell on it, but his face – well, the change was just beginning, of course, but it was quite unmistakable; quite dehumanizing, you know. There would have been some excitement up there, I’m afraid, just at sight of that face! And there were other details – things I only found out when I dissected his body. But I think I’d rather not go into them either, old boy, if you don’t mind…
‘The whole point is, we have to be rather careful down here, all of us in the “Special Detail”. That’s why we have such unusual working conditions. We wear police uniforms, of course, but we aren’t subject to ordinary police discipline. Lord! What would an above-ground “cop” make of having every other night off and every day all to himself, and with a salary that – well, a corporal down here gets as much as does an Inspector up there!
‘But, at that, I think we earn our pay…
‘I know I do. Of course I can’t tell you what my salary is – they made me promise never to disclose it when they hired me from the Natural History Museum back in – well, I don’t like to think about how long ago that was! I was Professor Gordon Craig in those days, you know, instead of Inspector Craig of N.Y.P.D. And I’d just returned from Carl Akeley’s first African expedition after gorillas. That was why they brought the Thing to me for examination, you see, after that first big wreck in the subway that’d only been opened less than a year. They’d found it pinned down in the wreckage, screaming in agony from their lights on its dead-white eyeballs. Indeed, it seemed to have died from the lights as much as from anything else. Organically it was sound enough, save for a broken bone or two.
Well, they brought it to me, because I was supposed to be the museum’s leading authority on apes. And I examined it – believe me, I examined it, old boy! I went for six days and nights without sleep or even rest, analyzing that dead corpse down to its last rag and bone and hank of hair!
‘No scientist on this earth ever had a chance like that before, and I was making the best of it.
I found out all there was to be found before I collapsed over my laboratory table and had to be taken to the hospital.
‘Of course long before that I had told them the thing wasn’t an ape. There was vaguely anthropoid structure, all right; and the blood corpuscles were almost human – quite shockingly so. But the head and the spade-like appendages and the muscular development were quite unlike any beast or man on this earth. Indeed, the thing had never been on this earth! There was no doubt of that! It would have died above ground in half a minute, just like an angleworm in the sun.
‘And I’m afraid my report to the authorities didn’t help them much. After all, even a fellow scientist would have found it a bit difficult to reconcile my classification of “some sort of giant, carrion-feeding, subterranean mole” with my ravings about “canine and simian developments of members” and my absurd insistence on “startlingly humanoid cranial development, and brain convolutions indicating a degree of intelligence that–”
‘Well, there’s no use going into all that now! I firmly expected them to order me up before a Sanity Commission when I reported my findings. Instead, they offered me a position as head of the “Special Subway Detail,” at a salary that was, to say the least, fantastic. It was more a month than I’d been getting a year from the museum.
‘Because, you see, they’d deduced much of the stuff for themselves without needing me to tell them! They had facts they’d deliberately withheld from me, not wanting to influence my report. They knew that that train had been deliberately derailed – the mutilated track proved that beyond all doubt. No less than three ties had been taken up and laid some distance away down the tunnel. And the condition of the earth about the wrecked cars showed conclusively that extensive mining and sapping had taken place there – it was like a gigantic mole-hill, only worse. And while I’d been analyzing stomach fluids and body tissue to try to find out what my subject fed upon, they’d been burying, secretly and with most elaborate precautions, the half-dessicated corpses of half a dozen men and women and children who – well, they hadn’t died in the wreck, old boy! They hadn’t died in the wreck, any more than had that screaming thing that hid its eyes from the lights when they found it pinned in the wreckage where it had been caught while trying to drag a dead victim out – God! What a hideous shambles that place must have been before the wrecking-crews got there.
‘Mercifully, of course, there was total darkness. The poor devils who were merely injured never knew what charnel horrors were going on in the Stygian depths about them – nor cared, no doubt, in their agony! A few of them gibbered afterward about green eyes, and claws that raked their faces – but of course all that was set down to delirium! Even one man who had his arm chewed half off never knew – surgeons amputated the rest immediately and told him when he regained consciousness that he’d lost it in the wreck. He’s still walking the streets today, blissfully ignorant of what almost happened to him that night.
‘Oh, you’d be surprised, old boy, how you can hush a thing up if you’ve got a whole city administration behind you! And believe me, we did hush matters up. No newspaper reporter was ever allowed to see the wreck – freedom of the press or no freedom of the press! The Government wanted to appoint a commission to investigate – we squelched it! And by the time the crews had cleaned out the smashed train and removed the last victim, the Special Subway Detail had gone into action. And it’s been on steady duty ever since – for the last twenty-odd years!
‘We had a terrible time at first, of course. All these modern improvements weren’t available then. All we had were lanterns and guns and hand-cars – with which to patrol nearly five miles of tunnel. It was Mrs. Partington sweeping back the sea all over again – only worse. A handful of puny mortals against Hell itself, in the eternal darkness of these long gloomy tunnels far below the city.
‘There were no more wrecks after we took over, though; I’ll say that much. Oh, an accident or two. How could we prevent them? We did everything we could think of! How we worked in those early years! Once we sank a shaft fifty feet deep in the earth, where we’d seen queer disturbances beside the train-tracks and heard queerer sounds. And once we blocked up both ends of the tunnel for a mile stretch and filled it with poison gas. And once we dynamited – but why go on? It was all useless, utterly useless. We just couldn’t get to grips with anything tangible. Oh, we’d hear sounds sometimes on our long dismal patrols in the darkness; our little lanterns mere pin-pricks of light in these vast old concrete vaults. We’d catch glimpses of glinting eyes far off, find fresh earth piled up where only a moment before there’d been hard-packed cinders and gravel. Once in a while we’d fire our guns at something whitish and half seen, but there’d be only a tittering laugh in answer – a laugh as mirthless and savage as that of a hyena, dying away in the earth…
‘A thousand times I was tempted to chuck the whole thing, to get back above ground to sunshine and sanity and forget the charnel horrors of this mad Nyarlathotep-world far underneath. And then I’d get to thinking of all those helpless men and women and children riding the trains unsuspecting through the haunted dark, with Evil out of the primeval dawn burrowing beneath them for their destruction, and – well, I just couldn’t go, that’s all. I stayed and did my duty, as the rest did, year after year. It’s been a strange career for a man of science, and certainly one I never dreamed I’d be following during all the years I prepared myself for museum work. And yet I flatte
r myself that it’s been rather a socially useful career at that; perhaps more so than stuffing animals for dusty museum cases, or writing monstrous textbooks that no one ever bothers to read. For I’ve a science of my own down here, you know: the science of keeping millions of dollars worth of subway tunnels swept clean of horror, and of safeguarding the lives of half the population of the world’s largest city.
‘And then, too, I’ve opportunities for research here which most of my colleagues above ground would give their right arms for, the opportunity to study an absolutely unknown form of life; a grotesquerie so monstrous that even after all these years of contact with it I sometimes doubt my own senses even now, although the horror is authentic enough, if you come right down to it. It’s been attested in every country in the world, and by every people. Why, even the Bible has references to the “ghouls that burrow in the earth”, and even today in modern Persia they hunt down with dogs and guns, like beasts, strange tomb-dwelling creatures neither quite human nor quite beast; and in Syria and Palestine and parts of Russia…
‘But as for this particular place – well, you’d be surprised how many records we’ve found, how many actual evidences of the Things we’ve uncovered from Manhattan Island’s earliest history, even before the white men settled here. Ask the curator of the Aborigines Museum out on Riverside Drive about the burial customs of Island Indians a thousand years ago – customs perfectly inexplicable unless you take into consideration what they were guarding against. And ask him to show you that skull, half human and half canine, that came out of an Indian mound as far away as Albany, and those ceremonial robes of aboriginal shamans plainly traced with drawings of whitish spidery Things burrowing through conventionalized tunnels; and doing other things, too, that show the Indian artists must have known Them and Their habits. Oh yes, it’s all down there in black and white, once we had the sense to read it!
The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories Page 58