Page 9 (1/2)

Chapter 9

UNDERWORLD

Just as I finished Freddie&039;s apartlimmer of bodily fluids), my phone buzzed One of the Shrink&039;sthat she wanted to see ain My stack of forue to bounce all the way up to the Shrink That was always a sign of progress

Still, I sometimes wished she would just talk to me on the phone and not insist on quite so much face time But she&039;s so old-school that telephones just aren&039;t her thing In fact, electricity isn&039;t her thing

I wonder if I&039;ll ever get that ancient

I took the subway down to Wall Street, then walked across The Shrink&039;s house is on a crooked alley paved with cobblestones, barely one car wide It&039;s one of those New Ao, running on the diagonal, flouting the grid in the sanores telephones Those early streets possess their own logic; they were built atop the age-old hunting trails of the Manhattan Indians Of course, the Indians were only following even more ancient paths created by deer

And ere the deer copying? I wondered Maybe h the pri about carrying the parasite - it makes you feel connected to the past As a peep, I&039;hout the ages There&039;s an unbroken chain of biting, scratching, unprotected sex, rat reservoirs, and various other for maniac, the poor human as first infected with the disease

So where did he or she get it frodom Most parasites leap to huo, so the original parasite-positive wasn&039;t exactly e&039;d call hunon as bitten by a dire wolf or giant sloth or saber-toothed weasel

I kicked a bag of garbage next to the Shrink&039;s stoop and heard the skittering of tiny claws inside it A few little faces peeked out to glare at me; then one rat jumped free and sca down a hole a the cobblestones

There are more of those holes than you&039;d think

When I first calirates or down eht Watch we see the city in layers We feel the sewers and the hollow sidewalks carrying electrical cables and steam pipes, and below that the older spaces: the baseiant buried caskets of abandoned breweries, the ancient septic tanks, the forgotten graveyards And, struggling to get free underneath, the old streas - all those pockets where rats, and s, can thrive

Dr Rat says that the only creatures that ever come out onto the surface are the weak ones, the punks who aren&039;t coh to feed thes, the rat kings and the other alpha beasties, live and die without ever troubling the daylight world Think about that for a second: There are creatures down there who&039;ve never seen a hu

The laden sky rumbled overhead, and I smelled rain

History Nature Weather My head was pounding, full of those big, abstract words that have their own cable channels

But it was the sound of those tiny scratching feet inside the garbage bag that followed me into the Shrink&039;s house and down the corridor to her session roo by an invisible wind

"Most ih papers on her desk "All it took was a few drinks to get you back to Morgan&039;s house"

"Yeah But it was an apartment, Dr Prolix Not ht have noticed"

The guy from Records in the other visitor&039;s chair raised his eyebrows at my tone, but the Shrink only folded her hands and sress"

I chewed my lip The Shrink didn&039;t need to knohat I was bummed about Not that it mattered anymore, the whole stupid way I&039;d had Lace helpout with her would have just gotten more and erous Lace hadn&039;t showed a bit of interest - not that kind of interest anyway - and I&039;d still coain Lesson learned Move on I was back in lone-hunter ress," I said "You sahat I found on the wall?"

"I read your 1158-S fro, yes"

"Well, I went back there today but didn&039;t find anything an o Not exactly an oven-fresh trail"

"Cal, eight months is the blink of an eye for Records To find out where Morgan has gone, perhaps we should look at where she came from"

"What do you mean?"

"The history of that property has proven interesting" She turned to the Records guy and waved her pale hand

"When the landlords in question filed their initial rent-control foran, "there were four residents on the seventh floor" His voice quivered slightly, and once or twice as he read, his eyes darted up to the creepy dolls, confir that he wasn&039;t comfortable in the Shrink&039;s office Not a hunter, just an average working stiff with a city job His chair was backed as far away froerh the city databases and hit apersons report froured they&039;d all beperson from the same address, and ould have already filed an MP-2068 with you guys But there was only one hit NYPD has no leads, and at this point it&039;s pretty ation"

Given what I&039;d seen in Lace&039;s apartuy who lived in 701 is gone" So pretty I just had to eat hiht, 701 Jesus Delanzo, age twenty-seven Photographer" He looked up at , he continued, "Aparte thirty-four Broker"

"Where does she live now?"

He frowned "We don&039;t exactly have an address for her Just a post office box in Brooklyn, and a cell phone that doesn&039;t answer"

"Rather anonymous, don&039;t you think?" the Shrink said

"And her friends and family don&039;t think it&039;s weird she lives in a post office box?" I asked

"We don&039;t know," the Records guy said "If they&039;re worried, they haven&039;t filed with the NYPD"

I frowned, but the Records guy kept going "A couple lived in the other apartht And guess what: Their ela Dreyfus&039;s, and they have the sas, and smiled, rather pleased to have put such a juicy coincidence on otten through to

"That&039;s only three apartments What about 704?"

He raised an eyebrow, looked down at his printouts, and shrugged "Unoccupied"

"Unoccupied?" I turned to the Shrink "But that&039;s where Morgan lived Her junk uy nodded "The post office doesn&039;t forward junk mail"

"But why don&039;t you have a record of her?"

He leafed through his folder as he shook his head "Because the landlord never filed an occupancy for her live there for free"

"For free? Fat chance," I said "That&039;s a three-grand-a-month apartment"

"Actually, uy corrected

"Ouch," I said

"The rent is not the , Cal," the Shrink said "There was so else Records didn&039;t notice until you prolanced sheepishly down at his papers "It&039;s not anything we usually flag for investigation But it isodd" He shuffled papers and unrolled a large set of blueprints across his knees "The building plans show an oversize foundation, much deeper and more elaborate than one would expect"

"A foundation?" I said "You round?"

He nodded "They didn&039;t have the air rights to put up a tall building, because it would block views of the river So they decided to make some extra space below There are several subbase out wider than the building overhead Room for a two-floor health club, supposedly"

"Health club in the base in a ritzy place like that"

The Shrink drew herself up "Unfortunately, this health club is not in a particularly healthy location They excavated too close to the PATH tunnel, an area where the island is veryporous That tunnel was only finished in 1908 Not everything stirred up by the intrusion has settled yet"

"Not settled yet?" I said "After a hundred years?"

The Shrink steepled her fingers "The big things down there awaken slowly, Kid And they settle slowly, too"

I sed Every old city in the world has a Night Watch of soing The asphalt is there for a very good reason - to put sos that live underneath

"It&039;s possible that this excavation has opened the lower environs," the Shrink said, "allowing so old to bubble up"

"You think they uncovered a reservoir?"

Neither of the

Re the disease? How broods store the parasite in their blood when their peeps die? Those broods can last a long tienerations of rats Old cities carry the parasite in their bones, the way chicken pox can live in your spinal column for decades, ready to pop out as horrible blisters in old age

"The health club, huh?" I said, shakingout"

"It s than rats and peeps to worry about" The Shrink paused "And thenthere are the owners"

"The owners?" I asked

The lanced at the Shrink, and the Shrink looked at me

"A first fa about the carriers of the Night Watch: They have a special affection for the families after whom the oldest streets are named Back in the 1600s, New Amsterdam was a small town, only a few thousand people, and everyone was someone&039;s cousin or uncle or indentured servant Certain loyalties go back a long way, and in blood

"Who are they? Boerums? Stuys?"

The Shrink&039;s eyes slitted as she spoke, one hand gesturing vaguely toward the half-forgotten world outside her town house "If I remember correctly, Joseph once lived on this very street And Aaron built his first home on Golden Hill, where Gold Street and Fulton now reheat in a field off Verdant Lane, although that field is called Times Square these days And they had ood boys, the Ryders, and the Night Mayor has kept up with their descendants, I believe"

I found my voice "Ryder, you said?"

"With a y," the Records guy offered softly

I sed "My progenitor&039;s naan Ryder"

"Then we have a probleuy from Records, whose na over the history of the Hoboken PATH tunnel, which was a lotthan you&039;d think

"The first incident was in 1880, killed twenty workers," Chip said "Then another in 1882 killed a few more than that They were supposedly explosions, and the company had the body parts to prove it"

"Handy," I said

"And leggy," he chuckled Out from under the soulless eyes of the Shrink&039;s doll collection, Chip was a certified laugh riot "That brought the project to a halt for a couple of decades Those incidents were in Jersey, but on this side of the river we never bought the cover story"

"Why not?"

"There are ancient tunnels that travel through the bedrock, all around these parts And around the PATH train, the tunnels arenewer" His fingers drifted along the tunnel blueprints on his desk "Check it out, Cal: If you add up the weight of all the plants and aniround, it&039;s actually anisms in every pinch of soil"

"Yeah, none of which is big enough to eat twenty people"

He lowered his voice "But that&039;s what happens after you&039;re buried, Kid Things in the ground eat you"

Great, now Records was calling me Kid "Okay, Chip," I said "But worms don&039;t eat people who are still alive"

"But there&039;s a food chain down there," he said "Souys don&039;t have a clue, do you?"

Chip shook his head "We have clues Those tunnels? They&039;re a lot like the trails of an earthworh the dirt"

I frowned and droppedThe fine-lined drawings - precisely scaled and covered in tiny symbols - showed only the shapes that human machines had carved fro our descent into the earth "So you think there are giant woruys in Records were a little morefactual"

"Yeah, well, we read a lot of weird stuff" He pointed his pen at the edge of the level labeled Health Club, Lower "This is what so ST-57" The pen tapped "The excavation goes too deep for comfort; it&039;s only a few yards above part of the exhaust system for the PATH tunnel Any variation from these plans, and they&039;re connected"

"Connected to what?"

"You ever seen those big exhaust towers by the river? The fans are about eighty feet across, sucking air all day Bad"

"Air is bad?"

"They&039;re puen down there!" Chip shook his head, tossed the pen disgustedly down onto the plans "That&039;s like pouring fertilizer on your weeds Lack of oxygen is the growth-li factor in a subterranean bio But those &039;explosions&039; in Jersey were a hundred and twenty years ago, after all We&039;re just talking rats these days, right?"

"Probably," Chip said

"Probably Wonderful" Standing there in the glooht now, tons of bricks andfan labored to bring oxygen down to us; without the flickering fluorescents it would be too dark even for my peep eyes to see Down here was hostile territory - a place for corpses and worer things that ate theuys at the PATH say that there are a few places under the exhaust towers that their workers have abandoned," Chip added "They aren&039;t officially condeoes down there anyan&039;s building?"

"Not far A couple hundred yards?"

My nose wrinkled, as if a bad smell had wafted into the cubicle Why couldn&039;t I have just lost inity the normal way? No vampiric infections, no subterranean et down there?"

"Through the front door" Chip ran a finger across the building plans, pointing out a set of syot major security all over the joint; cameras everywhere, especially in the lower levels"

"Crap"

"I thought you had an inside line That girl you mentioned in your 1158-S, the one who lives there now? Tell her you want to check out the basement"

"She had an attitude probleood with locks"

Chip raised an eyebrow

"Or a Sanitation badge," I flailed "Maybe a Health Inspector of Health Clubs?"