Lair of Dreams

Page 150

The platform was deserted at this hour. A newspaper story about a missing heiress had been taped to the wall beside an advertisement for a dandruff cure: Nora Hodkin, age eighteen. She had been seen four days ago heading to the downtown IRT wearing a blue dress and a brown hat. The grainy newspaper photograph of Nora Hodkin showed a pretty, wide-eyed girl astride a horse. Her distraught parents offered a five-hundred-dollar reward to anyone who found her.
Five hundred dollars! Nathan loosened his tie and sprawled out on a bench, thinking about what he could do with a reward like that. Why, he could move out of his cramped room in his boardinghouse and into a nice little place of his own farther uptown with a view of the East River. Come summer, he might even have enough for a week’s rental out on Long Island Sound. He liked the idea of coming back to Wall Street tanned and salt-kissed, with tales of decadent parties where the girls shed their clothes to dance on tables and white-gloved waiters passed around caviar served on little silver spoons. Nathan could practically feel the warmth of the beach sun on his back, and soon, his head bobbed on his neck as he fought sleep.
A strange noise snapped him back to attention. His skin had bubbled up into gooseflesh for some damned reason.
“Hello?” he called out sleepily. “Is somebody there?”
Nathan hurried to the edge of the platform, cupped a hand over his eyes and peered down the long, curving stretch of tracks. By golly, there was someone on the tracks—a girl!
“Hey—hey you, there!” he called to her. “Miss, you’d better come up from there. You’ll be hit.”
Nathan looked around for help, but there was no one else waiting with him at this late hour. Since they’d gone to the new coin-operated turnstiles, there were no longer any ticket choppers sitting nearby. He was utterly alone—except for the motionless girl in the tunnel. Some trick of shadow and high, stark subway light bathed her in phosphorescence. She glowed, this girl. Like an angel, Nathan thought. And she wore a blue dress.
“Miss Hodkin? Nora?” Nathan tried.
The girl’s head jerked up as if she registered the name.
It must be her—had to be! And suddenly, this lost, shining girl waiting for rescue seemed like the answer to Nathan’s desires. She was pretty. Her parents were rich. There was a reward. And when the boys back at the Exchange heard about his heroics, they’d clap him on the back, stick a cigar in his mouth, and say Attaboy! He’d be made—a man in full.
All of this buzzed through Nathan’s brain in a matter of seconds as the girl swayed precariously in the gloom. Then she turned and stumbled around the curve, out of sight.
“Miss Hodkin! Wait!” Nathan called to no avail. “Doggone it!”
Nathan was still a little woozy from the Scotch, but the booze also made him brave as he hopped onto the tracks and jogged down the center of the subway tunnel after his damsel in distress, the bright light of the station receding behind him. According to the appeal from her parents, Nora Hodkin had been missing for four days. She had to be weak from hunger, Nathan figured. Yet she was surprisingly quick. His lungs ached from trying to keep up. He was deep into the tunnel now and uneasy. The only light came from two weak work lights set up high, and Nathan slowed, mindful of the electrified third rail. Steel support beams flanked the tracks. In the eerie gloom, they loomed like giants’ legs. It sounded funny down here, too. He heard a high, tight whine—almost like train wheels, but not quite—and here and there, animalistic growling. What was that? It was enough to make him want to go back.
Just then, he spied the bright back of the girl’s blue dress as she lumbered across the tracks ahead.
“Miss Hodkin!” he called, closing the distance between them.
To the relief of Nathan’s aching legs and lungs, the girl finally slowed, and as she did, he noticed for the first time that Nora Hodkin didn’t move quite right. Her gait was uneven, and her arms twitched in a strange, quicksilver way, her fingers clutching at air.
She’s drunk or faint. That was his brain talking. But his gut disagreed. The girl’s movement was purposeful, not drunk; she moved as if driven by strong need. There was something not quite human about her. And just as this thought took form in Nathan’s Scotch-hazed mind, she stopped and turned.
Nora Hodkin might’ve been pretty at one time. But the thing facing him now had a gaunt, bleached face as fissured as a broken vase. Milky-blue eyes fixed on him. Nostrils flared as she sniffed, once, twice. Cracked lips peeled back from sharp, yellowed teeth. Black ooze dripped from the corners of her new smile. And Nathan understood at last what drove her: hunger. She was hunting. Leading him into a trap, like prey.