by Daniel Quinn
“I see,” I said again, obviously not seeing anything.
“But I can tell you this much—you’ll have to wear different clothes.”
“What kind of clothes?”
“The kind you won’t mind getting dirty.” When she saw me eyeing her own outfit, she told me we’d be stopping at her hotel so she could change.
I glanced again at my mother, who had been following the interchange with silent merriment, then turned and marched off to my room to change.
“If you’re going to sulk,” Mallory said when we were in the car, “I’ll give you a hint about where we’re going.”
“I’m not sulking,” I told her. “I’m brooding. There’s a subtle difference.”
“Is there? I didn’t know that.”
Mallory had changed—subtly but profoundly—in the forty hours that had passed since I last saw her. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Gloria had changed. She had in some mysterious way grown into, taken over, and fused with the body, the clothes, and the life of Mallory Hastings. This was a different person from the one I’d rescued from the hospital, perhaps the one who began to emerge during our visit to the Gramercy Park Academy for Girls.
I said, “I could see that you and Mother were getting along very nicely.”
“Yes, we were. Is that what you’re brooding about?”
“I think it is, yes. I’m a very possessive person, I fear.”
“Are you worried that I might take Mother away?”
I said no and let it go at that. It was the opposite possibility that worried me, that Mother might take Mallory away. Since I didn’t care to mention this, I asked her what hint she was prepared to offer about our expedition.
“You told me a story about a little boy who remembered hiding something behind a loose brick in a house he’d lived in during a previous life.”
“That’s right,” I told her. “Eddie Tucker.”
“I want to take you to my own ‘loose brick.’ ”
I drove for a bit as I pondered this, then said, “I hope you’re not serious.”
“Why?”
“After two thousand years? Think about it. The Empire State Building has been razed and rebuilt from the original plans not once but three times since you saw it as Gloria MacArthur.”
She was unfazed. “Two thousand years ago I put something down in a certain place. Today I’ll go and pick it up, right where I left it.”
“Will you tell me what it is?”
“No. Why?”
“So that when you find it …”
She grimaced. “So I can’t just pick up something at random and say, ‘This is it.’ ”
“I know you wouldn’t do that. I want you to tell me what it is so that when you find it, I can testify that it was what you said it would be.”
She surprised me by bursting into laughter. “I’d forgotten about all that. You still want to make your ‘case.’ What did you call it? The Golden Case?”
“It’s just something I owe the Fenshaws.”
“I tell you what,” Mallory said. “I’ll write it down on a piece of hotel stationery and seal it in an envelope, then you can hang onto it if you promise not to peek.”
“Of course I won’t peek,” I snapped, raising another laugh.
I WAITED IN the car for her to go up and change, and when she returned twenty minutes later, I said, “Where are we going, the Himalayas?” Along with her dungarees (which she had taught me to call jeans), she was wearing a heavy-looking backpack and was carrying another one, evidently for me. She slung them both in the backseat.
“If we could travel as the crow flies, it would probably turn out to be less than a mile. We have to start out from a location that isn’t very close to our destination.”
“And where do we have to start out?”
“Right in the middle of Hell’s Kitchen.”
“Where’s that?”
Mallory smiled. “I guess it’s no longer called Hell’s Kitchen. Head down to 10th Avenue and go north.”
After traveling a few blocks on 10th, she directed me to turn left on 49th.
“Midway down this block we’ll cross a ravine that goes down thirty feet or so. When we get to that, park anywhere you can.”
But there was no ravine.
“I guess it’s been built over. Go down to 11th, take a left, then come back on 48th.”
But there was no ravine on 48th either. We checked all the streets as far south as 42nd, then went back and started checking above 49th.
“A lot can happen to a city in two thousand years,” I observed evenly.
“Yeah. I just hope we don’t have to use a manhole.”
I hoped so too but held my tongue.
We finally got a possible break on 51st, where a building had been demolished on the north side of the street.
“But this isn’t midblock,” I told her. In fact it was just a few doors west of 10th.
“The ravine wasn’t midblock either. Trust me, this is right.”
We parked, shrugged into our backpacks, and went over to the site of the demolished building, enclosed by an eight-foot chain-link fence.
“What now?” I asked.
“We go over the fence, of course.”
“You’re joking.”
To demonstrate her seriousness, she scrambled over the fence, and said, “Come on, you can do it.”
I did it, not easily or nimbly or gracefully, but there came a time when we were both once again on the same side of the fence. Now that I was there, I had a different impression of the situation. Just beyond the lip of the sidewalk was a drop of perhaps twelve or fifteen feet to a confused pile of rubble. Even Mallory wasn’t foolhardy enough to leap into that. Following the side of the lot, we made our way to the back, which was still more or less at street level. Looking back from there, it was clear she was right. Fifty-first Street was a sort of shelf under which opened a dark trough-shaped portal extending almost the full width of the lot. We clambered down to it across twenty yards of debris of all kinds—masonry, timbers, pipes, wiring, lath, and plaster. Ducking under the lip of the street, we were then able to clamber down another fifteen yards to relatively solid ground, where two derelict railroad tracks disappeared into the tunnel ahead of us to the south.
“It’s a tunnel now,” Mallory noted and we walked on. “In my era—Gloria’s era—it was a ravine open to the sky all the way to 42nd Street. And I think there was still train traffic on these rails. The whole city is like this.”
“Like what?”
“It’s all built over things that used to be in the open air. There are whole rivers down here they built over and forgot.”
“You mean they’re still running?”
“Sure, why not? They weren’t dammed, they were just covered over and forgotten. All sorts of things were covered over and forgotten down here—ditches and canals dug and abandoned, subway lines built and scrapped. There’s a whole world down here, probably bigger than the one above.”
I looked up into the darker darkness overhead and tried to imagine being able to see the buildings of 48th Street, which is where we were by now, approximately.
Then, looking into the darkness ahead, I asked, “How do you know the way isn’t blocked in front of us the way it’s blocked behind us?”
“If it is, we’ll just have to find another way down. There are a million ways. This is just the one I know best.”
“We should have brought flashlights.”
“That’s what’s in the backpacks, mostly. Two big ones and two hand-held types in each, plus replacement batteries.”
“My God. Are you planning to set up camp?”
“No, I just wanted plenty of light.”
We walked on. I asked, “Why don’t we get a flashlight out now?”
“Because it’s not dark yet. It’s not anything like dark yet.”
“I’ve got an apartment by the ruins of Carthage outside Tunis,” I told her. “In the middle of t
he night, with all the drapes closed, it’s not as dark as this.”
“Your eyes’ll get used to it. You’ll see.”
One set of tracks curved off to the left, and we followed them, leaving behind the natural stone walls of the ravine and entering an obviously built environment—built, but hardly orderly. Dredge up a ship from the bottom of the ocean, and this is what it would look like inside, except that traces of the shipbuilder’s logic would inevitably remain. Here all was higgledy-piggledy and jury-rigged, put together with no guiding scheme, its original function unguessable.
Oddly enough, there was more light now. Our vista was wider. Passageways opened to the right and left, many of them lit by grates in the street twenty or thirty feet above. It was surprisingly quiet, the traffic overhead a distant thunder. The air was dank but not cold. The smell, being unlike anything I’d ever experienced, was indescribable. The delicately nurtured are protected from noxious odors, so we don’t learn to name them. There were strains or veins of evil stink—rotting fruit, ancient mold, generations of rancid petroleum, I don’t know—but this was no gut-wrenching sewer, at least as yet. To make up for the lack of sewer ambiance, however, there were plenty of rats, unruffled by our intrusion but giving way with thuggish sullenness.
I was following Mallory blindly and giving all my attention to avoiding the obstacles and entanglements that constituted the ground we were walking on. At some point, without my noticing it, we’d left the railroad tracks behind. After perhaps ten minutes of walking, we came to a distinctive, man-high object shaped like a fat torpedo. I call it distinctive because I’d never seen anything like it and couldn’t begin to imagine its function. Beside it, inexplicably, was a twenty-foot length of battered chain-link fence, strung out toward no discernible destination, connecting to nothing, fencing nothing in or out. The whole place was like this, teeming with features that must have made sense to the people who put them there but that were now utterly meaningless.
The torpedo object and the fence were evidently landmarks for Mallory. We followed the fence till it staggered to an end, then turned right into an arched opening indistinguishable from hundreds of others we’d passed. A round-sided tunnel stretched out ahead of us for perhaps thirty feet, where it opened into another room illuminated atmospherically by a grate above. We never reached that room. Mallory paused at a metal portal set into the wall at the left. Although she scratched and tugged, it was rusted shut, and we had to go looking for tools to open it with. Tools were in endless supply down there, though few were as straightforward as crowbars or screwdrivers. There were hunks of metal that could be used to pry and bang, and we used them to pry and bang till the door fell off its hinges and we were able to crawl through into a vault impenetrably black except for a dim luminance leaking up from a grate in the floor. It appeared that this was our destination, or at least an intermediate one.
After pulling off the grate, she took a flashlight from my backpack, and showed me where we were heading. Five feet below the grate was a ledge some sixteen or eighteen inches wide. We were going to drop down to that ledge and follow it to that object over there, that object being a metal cabinet whose top was about eight feet below the ledge. We were going to drop down to the top of that cabinet and from there to the floor another six feet below.
I looked at the project without enthusiasm.
“What is this place, anyway?” I asked. “I mean, what’s its significance to you?”
She shook her head impatiently, then abruptly dropped into the hole in front of us.
“Wait,” I said. “Let me get a flashlight.”
“You can take one from my pack once you get down here. Come on, I’ll light the way.”
She lit the way. When we got to the point where we had to drop down to the cabinet, she paused to play her flashlight over it.
“It looks all right,” she said. “Another couple inches of dust, I guess.”
But I was noticing something I hadn’t seen before. There was a gap of about a foot between the cabinet and the wall. “We can’t just hang over the edge and drop down to it,” I pointed out.
“No, we have to jump.”
“I’ll go first,” I said.
She smiled. “That’s very gallant but not very practical. The rule is, lightest goes first.” She stuck her flashlight inside her shirt and without ceremony jumped.
Terrifyingly, she crashed through the top of the cabinet but came to rest on some surface inside that was just a couple feet below.
“I’m all right,” she said, pulling herself out of the hole she’d dug with her feet. “I’ll go find some planks to cover the hole so you can jump.”
She sat down on the edge of the cabinet then shoved off to reach the floor six feet below. First, she dragged over some crates to build a two-step stairway against the side of the cabinet, then she went hunting for planks. Luckily, things like crates and planks were as plentiful down there as clods of dirt in a cornfield, so it was only a matter of minutes before a substantial platform had been laid across the hole in the cabinet below me, and I was able to make the descent to the next level.
When Mallory insisted on dismantling the platform and stairway before moving on, I asked why.
“Just a habit,” she said.
“Even habits have a point,” I insisted.
“Call it superstition then, like throwing spilled salt over your shoulder.”
I understood Mallory well enough by then to know I wasn’t going to get any more out of her than that.
• • •
This level, which I had to suppose was at least three stories below street level, was naturally darker than the one above and even more cluttered with incomprehensible structures and rusting machinery. Dusty pipes ran in all directions like massed armies, enormous timbers lay in confused piles like pickup sticks, and rotting tubes and electrical conduit dangled from every surface like vines in a jungle. Mallory was leading us through a maze of tunnels, and it occurred to me that I was now hopelessly lost.
“Where are we?” I asked. “I mean in relation to what’s aboveground.”
“I’d say we’re somewhere under the public library, assuming it’s still where it was in 1952. Or we might be a little west of there.”
After a few more zigs and zags, Mallory headed for what was to me just one more anomalous structure out of hundreds we’d passed, a flat-roofed shed surmounted by the remains of what had once been a pulley arrangement of some sort. The interior of the shed was closed off by a pair of matchboarded leaves sagging away from their strap hinges. When we tugged at them, they didn’t so much come open as come off.
“Watch out,” she warned, “there’s no floor in there.”
Indeed there was no floor but rather a six-foot-square shaft that appeared to go down about forty feet.
“I hope we’re not going to jump this one,” I said.
“No, there’s a ladder attached to the wall over there at the right.”
And so there was. Getting to it, however, would mean stepping across a chasm perhaps two feet wide. A distance of two feet doesn’t sound like much, but the idea of crossing it over a forty-foot drop gave me a sickening twinge in my stomach.
“Aren’t I clever?” Mallory said cheerily. “I brought some rope so we could lower our backpacks first.”
We shrugged out of them, threaded the rope through the straps, and sent them to the bottom. Then, with my flash lighting the way, Mallory swung across the void and started down the ladder. The ladder, at least, looked solid enough, apparently made of some rustproof alloy.
While she was descending, I considered my situation. I didn’t care for the idea of crossing the gap with a flashlight in one hand. I wanted both hands free for the business of grabbing the ladder, but I certainly wasn’t going to make that grab in the dark. Since we had flashlights to spare, I decided to sacrifice one to illuminate the ladder while I was taking that big step. I dragged over a crate and positioned the flash to bounce light off the facing
wall onto the ladder, so I wouldn’t block it with my own body. Two minutes later, Mallory was down, and it was my turn. Ignoring the twinge, I stepped across and grabbed.
The ladder wobbled, or maybe I wobbled, I couldn’t be absolutely sure which it was. The ladder was held away from the wall by a ten-inch brace. I stared at this brace, irresistibly contemplating the fact that the wooden plank it was screwed into was at least two thousand years old.
Well, it was bound to be fastened at lower points as well, where the wall would be stone. I looked back at the platform I’d just left. It was still there, just a step away. I’m afraid nothing but vanity decided the matter. I declined to lose face over a qualm that was probably groundless, so I began my descent.
Just below floor level, I saw there were indeed more braces, these screwed into masonry. The trouble was, I had enough light to see that, as I lowered my right foot to the next rung, the ladder shifted slightly to the left. As I lowered my left foot to the next rung, the ladder shifted slightly to the right. With every step, I was using the weight of my body to pull the ladder away from the wall. I decided to hurry. Keeping my body as close to the ladder as possible, I took three more steps down. One screw gave—I could feel it. A second followed quickly, then they all went in rapid succession like a burst of machine-gun fire as the ladder began to topple backward.
“I’m going to die now,” I remember thinking.
But of course the ladder’s yaw was broken by the other side of the shaft, leaving me dangling by my hands like an apple.
“Help,” I croaked superfluously.
“You’ve got to get on the other side of the ladder,” Mallory shouted up to me.
“I’d like to do that very much,” I would have said if I’d had any breath. As it was, I just squawked, “How?”
“Wait, I’m coming.”
I felt the ladder thrum as she climbed, on the “wrong” side, of course. I began to wonder how long I could actually hang on this way. Minutes seemed to pass, but it was probably just seconds.
Mallory reached between two rungs, grabbed my belt, and said, “Give me your right leg.”