Peeps
Chapter 9
Chapter 9
UNDERWORLD
Just as I finished Freddie's apartment (finding no glimmer of bodily fluids), my phone buzzed. One of the Shrink's minders was on the other end, saying that she wanted to see me again. My stack of forms had returned from Records, chock-full of enough intrigue 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's so old-school that telephones just aren't her thing. In fact, electricity isn't her thing.
I wonder if I'll ever get that ancient.
I took the subway down to Wall Street, then walked across. The Shrink's house is on a crooked alley paved with cobblestones, barely one car wide. It's one of those New Amsterdam originals that the Dutch laid down four centuries ago, running on the diagonal, flouting the grid in the same grumpy way that the Shrink ignores 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 who were the deer copying? I wondered. Maybe my route had first been cut through the primeval forest by a line of hungry ants.
One thing about carrying the parasite - it makes you feel connected to the past. As a peep, I'm a blood brother to every other parasite-positive throughout the ages. There's an unbroken chain of biting, scratching, unprotected sex, rat reservoirs, and various other forms of fluid-sharing between me and that original slavering maniac, the poor human who was first infected with the disease.
So where did he or she get it from? you may ask. From elsewhere in the animal kingdom. Most parasites leap to humanity from other species. Of course, it was a long time ago, so the original parasite-positive wasn't exactly what we'd call human. More likely the first peep was some early Cro-Magnon who was bitten by a dire wolf or giant sloth or saber-toothed weasel.
I kicked a bag of garbage next to the Shrink'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 scampered a few yards down the alley, disappearing down a hole among the cobblestones.
There are more of those holes than you'd think.
When I first came to the city, I saw only street level, or sometimes caught glimpses of the netherworld through exhaust grates or down empty subway tracks. But in the Night 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 basements of fallen buildings, the giant buried caskets of abandoned breweries, the ancient septic tanks, the forgotten graveyards. And, struggling to get free underneath, the old streambeds and natural springs - all those pockets where rats, and much bigger things, can thrive.
Dr. Rat says that the only creatures that ever come out onto the surface are the weak ones, the punks who aren't competitive enough to feed themselves down where it's safe. The really big things, 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've never seen a human being.
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's house and down the corridor to her session room, pushed along by an invisible wind.
"Most impressive, Cal." She leafed through papers on her desk. "All it took was a few drinks to get you back to Morgan's house."
"Yeah. But it was an apartment, Dr. Prolix. Not many houses in Manhattan these days, you might have noticed."
The guy from Records in the other visitor's chair raised his eyebrows at my tone, but the Shrink only folded her hands and smiled. "Still glum? But you're making such progress."
I chewed my lip. The Shrink didn't need to know what I was bummed about. Not that it mattered anymore, the whole stupid way I'd had Lace help me. Even if she'd gone on believing me, hanging out with her would have just gotten more and more torturous.
Worse than that, it had been dangerous. Lace hadn't showed a bit of interest - not that kind of interest anyway - and I'd still come close to kissing her.
Never again. Lesson learned. Move on. I was back in lone-hunter mode now.
"Yeah, gallons of progress," I said. "You saw what I found on the wall?"
"I read your 1158-S from this morning, yes."
"Well, I went back there today but didn't find anything more on the creepy graffiti front. Or much else. Morgan moved out at least seven months, ago. 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 forms," he began, "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, confirming that he wasn't comfortable in the Shrink's office. Not a hunter, just an average working stiff with a city job. His chair was backed as far away from the red line as it could go. No typhoid germs for him. "We ran the names of these individuals through the city databases and hit a missing persons report from March this year."
"Only one?" I asked. "I figured they'd all be missing."
He shook his head. "More than one missing person from the same address, and we would have already filed an MP-2068 with you guys. But there was only one hit. NYPD has no leads, and at this point it's pretty much a dead investigation."
Given what I'd seen in Lace's apartment, that wording was appropriate. "So let me guess: The guy who lived in 701 is gone." So pretty I just had to eat him.
The man from Records nodded. "That's right, 701. Jesus Delanzo, age twenty-seven. Photographer." He looked up at me, and when I didn't say anything, he continued, "Apartment 702 was occupied by Angela Dreyfus, age thirty-four. Broker."
"Where does she live now?"
He frowned. "We don't exactly have an address for her. Just a post office box in Brooklyn, and a cell phone that doesn't answer."
"Rather anonymous, don't you think?" the Shrink said.
"And her friends and family don't think it's weird she lives in a post office box?" I asked.
"We don't know," the Records guy said. "If they're worried, they haven't filed with the NYPD."
I frowned, but the Records guy kept going. "A couple lived in the other apartment - 703. Patricia and Joseph Moore, both age twenty-eight. And guess what: Their mail forwards to the same post office box as Angela Dreyfus's, and they have the same phone number." He leaned back, crossed his legs, and smiled, rather pleased to have put such a juicy coincidence on my plate.
But his last words hadn't even gotten through to me yet. Something else was really wrong.
"That'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's where Morgan lived. Her junk mail is still showing up there."
The Records guy nodded. "The post office doesn't forward junk mail."
"But why don't you have a record of her?"
He leafed through his folder as he shook his head. "Because the landlord never filed an occupancy form for that apartment. Maybe they were letting her live there for free."
"For free? Fat chance," I said. "That's a three-grand-a-month apartment."
"Actually, more like thirty-five hundred," the Records guy corrected.
"Ouch," I said.
"The rent is not the most unsettling thing about that building, Cal," the Shrink said. "There was something else Records didn't notice until you prompted them to look."
The guy glanced sheepishly down at his papers. "It's not anything we usually flag for investigation. But it is ... odd." 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 mean, the part that's underground?"
He nodded. "They didn'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 subbasements descending into the granite bedrock, spreading out wider than the building overhead. Room for a two-floor health club, supposedly."
"Health club in the basement." I shrugged. "Not surprising 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 very ... porous. 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 swallowed. Every old city in the world has a Night Watch of some kind, and they all get nervous when the citizens start digging. The asphalt is there for a very good reason - to put something solid between you and the things that live underneath.
"It's possible that this excavation has opened the lower environs," the Shrink said, "allowing something old to bubble up."
"You think they uncovered a reservoir?"
Neither of them said anything.
Remember what I said about rats carrying the disease? How broods store the parasite in their blood when their peeps die? Those broods can last a long time after the peeps are gone, spreading the disease down generations 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, shaking my head. "That's what people get for working out."
"It may be more than a reservoir, Cal. There may be larger things than rats and peeps to worry about." The Shrink paused. "And then ... there are the owners."
"The owners?" I asked.
The man from Records glanced at the Shrink, and the Shrink looked at me.
"A first family," she said.
"Oh, crap," I answered. One thing 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's cousin or uncle or indentured servant. Certain loyalties go back a long way, and in blood.
"Who are they? Boerums? Stuys?"
The Shrink'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 meet. Mercer Ryder's farm was up north a ways - he grew wheat in a field off Verdant Lane, although that field is called Times Square these days. And they had more farmland in Brooklyn. They were good 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 swallowed. "My progenitor's name is Morgan Ryder."
"Then we have a problem," said the Shrink.
The guy from Records, whose name was Chip, took me down to his cubicle. We were going over the history of the Hoboken PATH tunnel, which was a lot more exciting than you'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'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 are ... newer." 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 animals that live under the ground, it's actually more than everything that lives above. About a billion organisms in every pinch of soil."
"Yeah, none of which is big enough to eat twenty people."
He lowered his voice. "But that's what happens after you're buried, Kid. Things in the ground eat you."
Great, now Records was calling me Kid. "Okay, Chip," I said. "But worms don't eat people who are still alive."
"But there's a food chain down there," he said. "Something has to be at the top."
"You guys don't have a clue, do you?"
Chip shook his head. "We have clues. Those tunnels? They're a lot like the trails of an earthworm through the dirt."
I frowned and dropped my eyes back to the blueprints for Lace's building. The fine-lined drawings - precisely scaled and covered in tiny symbols - showed only the shapes that human machines had carved from the soil. No hint at the environment surrounding our descent into the earth. "So you think there are giant worms down there? I thought you guys in Records were a little more ... factual."
"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 somebody should have noticed - and then filed a great big ST-57." The pen tapped. "The excavation goes too deep for comfort; it's only a few yards above part of the exhaust system for the PATH tunnel. Any variation from these plans, and they'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're pumping oxygen down there!" Chip shook his head, tossed the pen disgustedly down onto the plans. "That's like pouring fertilizer on your weeds. Lack of oxygen is the growth-limiting factor in a subterranean biome!"
"Ah, so things are growing. But those 'explosions' in Jersey were a hundred and twenty years ago, after all. We're just talking rats these days, right?"
"Probably," Chip said.
"Probably. Wonderful." Standing there in the gloom, I realized that Chip and I were underground right now, tons of bricks and mortar piled up over our heads. The squeaking ceiling fan 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 worms, and the bigger things that ate the worms, and the bigger things that ate them...
"But our guys at the PATH say that there are a few places under the exhaust towers that their workers have abandoned," Chip added. "They aren't officially condemned, but nobody goes down there anymore."
"Great. And how close is that to Morgan's building?"
"Not far. A couple hundred yards?"
My nose wrinkled, as if a bad smell had wafted into the cubicle. Why couldn't I have just lost my virginity the normal way? No vampiric infections, no subterranean menaces. "Okay, so what's the best way for me to get down there?"
"Through the front door." Chip ran a finger across the building plans, pointing out a set of symbols. "They've got 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 problem. I'd rather break in. I'm good with locks."
Chip raised an eyebrow.
"Or a Sanitation badge," I flailed. "Maybe a Health Inspector of Health Clubs?"
"What happened between you and her?"
"Nothing!"
"You can tell me, Kid."
I groaned, but Chip fixed me with his big brown eyes. "Look, it's just that she... We had this..." My voice fell. "There was a Superhuman Revelation Incident, sort of."
"There was?" Chip frowned. "Have you filed an SRI-27/45?"
"No, I haven't filed an SRI-27/45. It's not like she saw me climbing up a wall or anything. All I did was sort of... lift her up, and only for a second."
"And?"
"And swing her from one balcony to another. Otherwise we were going to get caught breaking and entering. Just entering, I mean - nothing was broken." I decided not to get into the Grand Theft Blender issue. "Look, Chip, all I need are some traps and a Pest Control badge. Catch a few rats, let the Doctor test their blood, see if we've got a running reservoir. First things first. No big deal."
Chip nodded slowly, then looked down and continued detailing the lower depths of the Hoboken PATH tunnel, letting his expression say it all.
"Pretty late, isn't it?"
"Tell me about it," I grunted at the doorman, willing him not to look too closely at my face. He was the same guy from that afternoon, but now I was dressed in a standard city-issue hazmat suit, a wool cap pulled down to my eyebrows. My oven-fresh Sanitation badge was flopped open in his face. In more ways than one, I was presenting a different picture than I had nine hours before.
"Yeah, I'm on till midnight myself," he said, his eyes dropping from my face as he pulled out a desk drawer. He hadn't recognized me. The clothes do make the man, as far as most people are concerned.
He yanked out a clattering ring of keys, and we headed to the elevator.
"Did you guys get a complaint from one of our tenants? I never heard nothing about rats here."
"No, just some problems nearby. Population explosion by the river."
"Yeah, the river. Always smells damp down in the basement. Kind of fishy." The elevator door opened. He leaned one shoulder against it, blocking its attempts to close while he counted through the keys until he found one marked with a green plastic ring. He slipped it into a keyhole marked B2 at the bottom of the controls and gave it a half turn.
"You ever heard of a tenant getting bitten here?" I asked. "Maybe a year ago or so?"
He looked up at me. "Didn't work here then. No one did. They hired all new staff early this year. The old guys were running some kind of payroll scam, I hear."
"Ah. I see." I made a mental note to run all those doormen's and janitors' names through Records.
He pressed the B2 button, keeping one hand on the door's rubber bumpers. "Not that hardly that many people use it down there. Only a few diehards. Like I said, smells funny. By the way, when you come back up, don't forget to mention you're leaving to whoever's on the door. It's supposed to be locked up down there this time of night."
"No problem." I lifted my duffel bag in weary half salute.
He smiled and let the door close. The elevator took me down.
It did smell funny.
There were about fifty kinds of mold growing down there, and I could smell the rot of wooden beams behind the walls, dried human sweat on the padded weight benches, assorted shoes decaying behind the slats of locker doors.
But behind the health club smells, something else was brewing. I couldn't quite figure out what. Smells are not as easy to place as sights and sounds. They're like suppressed memories: You sometimes have to let them bubble up on their own.
I let the elevator close its door and glide away, not switching on any lights. I didn't want the doorman watching me on the security cameras. I was hoping he would forget I was down here and go off his shift without mentioning me to the next guy.
Once my eyes adjusted, the red glow of the thermostats and exercise machine controls were enough to see by. For a few minutes, though, I just stood there, listening for the sounds of tiny feet.
It didn't seem a likely spot for a rat invasion; there wasn't any source of food down here, not even a candy machine. In any case, street-level garbage eaters weren't the only issue here. I was looking for big alpha rats - and, if Chip was right, unnamed other things - bubbling up from below. Things that had never heard of M&M's.
All I could hear was the refrigerator in the juice machine, the hiss of steam heat, and a distant steady rumble. I knelt and pressed one palm flat against the floor, feeling the vibration spreading into my flesh along with the chill of the cement. The rumble was cycling slowly - maybe it was those eighty-foot fan blades that gave Chip nightmares.
But I didn't hear any rats, or any of Chip's monsters, for that matter. I moved among the dark shapes of machines, the red eyes of their controls winking at me. The smell of chlorine rose from a covered Jacuzzi. That other scent, the one I couldn't identify, seemed to grow stronger as I moved toward the back wall.
Then I felt a draft, the slightest hint of cold. I swept my eyes across the baseboard behind the radiator, searching for a rat-hole letting in the autumn chill of the earth. Rats don't need much space to crawl through; they can break down their own skeletons and squeeze through holes the size of quarters. (We peeps can supposedly do that too, but it hurts like hell, I've heard.)
There weren't any openings along the floor. The fittings around the steam pipes were tight. I didn't spot any doors to slip under, no loose tiles in the ceiling. No way for anything to bubble up from the depths.
But in the farthest corner of the gym, the paneled walls themselves radiated cold.
I gave the wall a thump.
It was hollow.
Hearing the empty sound, I realized something about the darkened health club - it didn't have any stairs down. The second level promised in the blueprints didn't exist. Or it was hidden.
My duffel bag clanked against the concrete floor. From a pocket, I pulled the plans that Chip had printed for me, checking my compass. According to the blueprints, the sub-basement stairs were only a few yards away, on the other side of the wall.
The wood paneling didn't give at all when I pushed; there was something solid behind it. Of course, my duffel bag was full of drills, hacksaws, bolt cutters, and a crowbar, or I could have just put my fist through the wall. But I still had to come back in my Sanitation costume to reclaim any rats my traps caught, and the staff doesn't like it when you break their building.
I moved along the wall, pressing and thumping. The echoes were muffled, which meant that lots of crisscrossed S beams supported the paneling. The stairs were solidly sealed off as well, with no easy way in. Had they just abandoned a whole subbasement down there?
The wood paneling ended at a row of lockers - too heavy to move, even with my peep muscles. I tapped the floor with my feet, wondering what was hidden beneath. From the ceiling, the red eyes of security cameras glowed mockingly in the darkness.
Then I realized something: All of the cameras were pointed more or less at me. Were they tracking me?
I moved a few yards, back into the cold corner, but the cameras didn't follow. They all stayed pointed at the same target - the row of lockers. Whoever had set the security system up didn't care what happened in the rest of the health club, as long as they could watch that one spot.
I walked along the lockers, running my fingers against them, smelling the dirty socks and chlorinated swimsuits inside. The metal grew colder as I went.
In the center, one locker was icy to my touch, and through its ventilation slats that half-familiar scent - the one I couldn't quite identify - floated on a draft of chilled air. I looked up at the cameras; they were all pointed directly at me now.
The padlock was an off-the-shelf Master Lock, though with four tumblers instead of the usual three, more expensive than the others. I knelt, cradling it like a cell phone to my head. As the numbers spun left, then right, I heard the tiny steel teeth connecting, the tumblers aligning ... until it sprang open, as loud as a gunshot in my ear.
Sliding the lock off the hasp, I opened the door.
There was nothing inside - nothingness, in fact. No hanging clothes, no hooks or shelves, just a black void that consumed the dim light of the gym. A chill wind came from the darkness, bearing that same half-familiar smell, sharpened now.
I reached into the locker. My hand went back into the darkness and cold, disappearing into nothingness.
Let me get this straight about my night vision: When I'm at home, the only light I keep on is the red LED of my cell-phone charger; I can read fine print by starlight; I have to tape over the glowing clock face of my DVD player, because otherwise it's too bright to sleep in my bedroom.
But I couldn't see jack inside this locker.
There is something called cave darkness, which is ten times darker than sitting in a closet with towels stuffed under the door, covering your eyes with your hands - basically darker than anything you've ever experienced except down in a cave. Your hands disappear in front of your face, you can't tell whether your eyes are open or not, random red lights seem to flicker in your peripheral vision as your brain freaks out from the total absence of light.
"Great," I said.
Hoisting my duffel bag, I slipped through into the void.
The standard Night Watch flashlight has three settings. One is a low-light mode designed not to burn out peep night vision. The second setting is a normal flashlight, useful for normal people. The third is a ten-thousand-lumen eyeball-blaster intended to blow away peeps, scare away rat hordes, and generally indicate panic. Held a few inches from your skin, it will actually give you a suntan.
Switching on the tiny light, I found myself in a narrow hallway, squeezed between the foundation's cement wall and the back side of the maniacally reinforced wood paneling. The floor was covered with little globs of something gooey. I knelt and sniffed and realized what I'd been smelling all along - peanut butter, mixed with the chalky funk of rat poison. Someone had laid out about a hundred jars of weaponized extra-crunchy back here. The bottom of the false wall was smeared with it to prevent the wood paneling from being gnawed through.
I stepped carefully among the gooey smears, and the hallway led me back to the corner where the missing stairs should have been. An industrial-strength metal door stood there, reinforced with yards of chain and generous wads of steel wool stuffed into the crack beneath it.
Steel wool is one thing rats can't chew through. Someone was working conscientiously on the rat issue. Hopefully that meant Chip was crazy on the giant monster issue, and all there was down here was some peep's long-lost brood.
The chains wound back and forth between the door's push-bar handle and a steel ring cemented into the wall, secured with big, fat padlocks that took keys instead of combinations. To save time, I pulled bolt cutters from my bag and snipped the chains. As taut as rubber bands, they snapped loose and clattered to the floor.
Funny, I thought, chains don't keep out rats.
Ignoring that uncomfortable fact, I gave the door a good hard push; it scraped inward a few inches. Through the gap, the promised stairs led downward into smellier smells and colder air and darker darkness. Sounds filtered up: little feet scurrying, the snufflings of tiny noses, the nibblings of razor-sharp teeth. An all-night rat fiesta - but what were they eating down there?
Not chocolate, was my guess.
I pulled on thick rubber gloves.
The gap was just big enough to squeeze through. As I descended, I kept one thumb on the flashlight's eyeball-blaster switch, ready to blaze away if there was a peep down here. I couldn't hear anything bigger than a rat, but, as I've said, parasite-positives can hold their breath for a long time.
The rats must have heard me cutting the chains, but they didn't sound nervous. Did they get a lot of visitors?
At the bottom of the stairs, my night vision began to adjust to the profound darkness, and the basement eased into focus. At first I thought the floor was slanted, then I saw that a long swimming pool dominated the room, sloping away from me. The paired arcs of chrome ladders glowed on either side, and a diving board thrust out from the edge of the deep end.
The pool contained something much worse than water, though.
Along its bottom skittered a mass of rats, a boiling surface of pale fur, slithering tails, and tiny rippling muscles. They scrambled along the pool's edges, gathered in feeding frenzies around piles of something I couldn't see. All of them had the wormy look of deep-underground rats, slowly losing their gray camouflage - and ultimately even their eyesight - as they spent generation after generation out of the sun.
A fair number of ratty skeletons were lined up on one side of the basement, bare ribs as thin as toothpicks - as if someone had put out glue traps in a neat row.
There were a lot of smells (as you might imagine) but one stood out among the others, raising my hackles. It was the scent mark of a predator. In Hunting 101, we had been taught to call it by its active molecule: 4-mercapto-4-methylpentan-2-1. But most folks just call it "cat pee."
What the hell was a cat doing down here? Sure, there are feral felines in New York. But they live on the surface, in abandoned buildings and vacant lots, within paw's reach of humanity. They stay out of the Underworld, and rats stay away from them. When it comes to rats, cats are on our side.
If one had stumbled down here, it would be lean pickings by now.
I forced that last image from my mind and reached into the duffel bag for an infrared camera. Its little screen winked to life, turning the horde of rats into a blobby green snowstorm. I set the camera on the pool's edge, pointing down into the maelstrom. Dr. Rat and her Research and Development pals could watch this stuff for hours.
Then I realized something: I didn't smell chlorine.
With my nose, even a swimming pool that's been drained for years retains that tangy chemical scent. The pool had never been filled, which meant that the rat invasion had happened before they'd finished construction down here. I looked at the pool: The black line at water height had been half started, then abandoned.
I remembered Dr. Rat's standard checklist: My first job was to figure out if this brood had access to the surface. I began a slow walk around the edge of the basement, flashlight still set low, moving carefully, looking for any holes in the walls.
The rats hardly noticed me. If this was the brood that had infected Morgan, they would find my scent comforting - our parasites were closely related, after all. On the other hand, true Underworld rats might behave this way with anyone. Never having seen a human being before, their little pink eyes wouldn't know what to make of me.
The walls looked solid, not even hairline cracks in the cement. Of course, this building was just over a year old - the foundation should have been rat-proof for another decade or so.
I peered over the edge. In the deep end, right where the drain should have been, was a boiling mass of rats. Pale bodies struggled against one another, some disappearing into the mass, others thrashing their way up and out. The brood did have a way out of this basement, I realized, but it didn't go up to the surface...
It went down.
I swallowed. The Night Watch would want to know exactly how big this opening was. Merely rat-size? Or were bigger things afoot?
I walked slowly back around to the shallow end of the pool and picked up the infrared camera. With it in one hand and the flashlight in the other, I put one tentative foot into the pool.
The sole of my boot didn't make a sound. A layer of something soft was strewn across against the bottom of the pool, fluttering beneath the claws of darting rats. It was too dark to see what.
Something ran across my boot, and I shuddered.
"Okay, guys, let's observe some personal space here," I said, then took another step.
Something answered my words, something that wasn't a rat. A long, high-pitched moan echoed through the room, like the sound of a mewling infant...
At the very end of the diving board, two reflective eyes opened, and another annoyed growl rumbled out.
A cat was looking at me, its sleepy eyes floating against invisibly black fur. A host of big, gnarly alpha rats sat around it on the diving board, like kingly attendants to an emperor, when they should have been running for their lives.
The eyes blinked once, strangely red in the flashlight's glow. The cat looked like a normal cat of normal-cat size, but this was not a normal place for any cat to be.
But cats didn't carry the parasite. If they did, we'd all be peeps by now. They live with us, after all.
My eyes fell from the feline's unblinking gaze, and I saw what the rats were eating: pigeons. Their feathers were the soft layer lining the pool. The cat was hunting for its brood, just like a peep would. And I heard a sound below the ratty squeaks - the cat purring softly, as if trying to calm me down.
It was family to me.
Suddenly, the floor began trembling, a vibration that traveled up through my cowboy boots and into my muscle-clenched stomach. My vision began to shudder, as if an electric toothbrush had been jammed into my brain. A new smell rose up from the swimming pool drain, something I couldn't recognize - ancient and foul, it made me think of rotten corpses. It made me want to run screaming.
And through it all, the cat's low purr of satisfaction filled the room.
I squeezed my eyes shut and switched the flashlight to full power.
I could only hear (and feel) what happened next: a thousand rats panicking, pouring out of the pool to race for the dark corners of the room, flowing past my legs in a furry torrent. Hundreds more scrambled to escape down the drain and into the darkness below, their claws scraping the broken concrete as they fought to flee the horrifying light. Bloated rat king bodies flopped from the diving board and landed on the struggling mass, squealing like squeaky toys dropped from a height.
I fumbled a pair of sunglasses out of a pocket, got them on, and opened one eye a slit: The cat was unperturbed, still curled at the end of the diving board, eyes shut against the light, looking like an ordinary cat lying happily in the sun. It yawned.
The trembling of the floor had begun to fade, and the traffic jam of escaping rats was starting to break up. The drain hole looked to be more than a yard across; the deep end of the pool had cracked open, crumbling into some larger cavity below. The rats were still roiling, disappearing into it like crap down a flushing toilet.
Squinting up at the cat again, I saw that it had risen to its feet. It was stretching lazily, yawning, its tongue curling pink and obscene.
"You just stay there, kitty," I called above the din, and took another step toward the drain. How deep was the hole? Cat-size? Peep-size? Monster-size?
I only needed one glimpse and I was out of there.
Between my blazing flashlight and the squeaks and scrambling feet echoing off the sides of the pool, I was almost blind and practically deafened. But the weird smell of death was fading, and just as the last rats were finally clearing out, I caught the slightest whiff of something new in the air. Something close ...
A sharp hiss sounded behind me, someone sucking in air. As I spun around, the flashlight slipped from my sweaty fingers...
It cracked on the swimming pool floor, and everything went very dark.
I was completely blind, but before the flashlight had died I'd glimpsed a human form at the edge of the pool. Following the bright image burned into my retinas, I ran the few steps up the slope and leaped from the pool, raising the camera like a club.
As I swung, I caught her smell again, freezing just in time.
Jasmine shampoo, mixed with human fear and peanut butter... and I knew who it was.
"Cal?" Lace said.
UNDERWORLD
Just as I finished Freddie's apartment (finding no glimmer of bodily fluids), my phone buzzed. One of the Shrink's minders was on the other end, saying that she wanted to see me again. My stack of forms had returned from Records, chock-full of enough intrigue 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's so old-school that telephones just aren't her thing. In fact, electricity isn't her thing.
I wonder if I'll ever get that ancient.
I took the subway down to Wall Street, then walked across. The Shrink's house is on a crooked alley paved with cobblestones, barely one car wide. It's one of those New Amsterdam originals that the Dutch laid down four centuries ago, running on the diagonal, flouting the grid in the same grumpy way that the Shrink ignores 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 who were the deer copying? I wondered. Maybe my route had first been cut through the primeval forest by a line of hungry ants.
One thing about carrying the parasite - it makes you feel connected to the past. As a peep, I'm a blood brother to every other parasite-positive throughout the ages. There's an unbroken chain of biting, scratching, unprotected sex, rat reservoirs, and various other forms of fluid-sharing between me and that original slavering maniac, the poor human who was first infected with the disease.
So where did he or she get it from? you may ask. From elsewhere in the animal kingdom. Most parasites leap to humanity from other species. Of course, it was a long time ago, so the original parasite-positive wasn't exactly what we'd call human. More likely the first peep was some early Cro-Magnon who was bitten by a dire wolf or giant sloth or saber-toothed weasel.
I kicked a bag of garbage next to the Shrink'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 scampered a few yards down the alley, disappearing down a hole among the cobblestones.
There are more of those holes than you'd think.
When I first came to the city, I saw only street level, or sometimes caught glimpses of the netherworld through exhaust grates or down empty subway tracks. But in the Night 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 basements of fallen buildings, the giant buried caskets of abandoned breweries, the ancient septic tanks, the forgotten graveyards. And, struggling to get free underneath, the old streambeds and natural springs - all those pockets where rats, and much bigger things, can thrive.
Dr. Rat says that the only creatures that ever come out onto the surface are the weak ones, the punks who aren't competitive enough to feed themselves down where it's safe. The really big things, 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've never seen a human being.
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's house and down the corridor to her session room, pushed along by an invisible wind.
"Most impressive, Cal." She leafed through papers on her desk. "All it took was a few drinks to get you back to Morgan's house."
"Yeah. But it was an apartment, Dr. Prolix. Not many houses in Manhattan these days, you might have noticed."
The guy from Records in the other visitor's chair raised his eyebrows at my tone, but the Shrink only folded her hands and smiled. "Still glum? But you're making such progress."
I chewed my lip. The Shrink didn't need to know what I was bummed about. Not that it mattered anymore, the whole stupid way I'd had Lace help me. Even if she'd gone on believing me, hanging out with her would have just gotten more and more torturous.
Worse than that, it had been dangerous. Lace hadn't showed a bit of interest - not that kind of interest anyway - and I'd still come close to kissing her.
Never again. Lesson learned. Move on. I was back in lone-hunter mode now.
"Yeah, gallons of progress," I said. "You saw what I found on the wall?"
"I read your 1158-S from this morning, yes."
"Well, I went back there today but didn't find anything more on the creepy graffiti front. Or much else. Morgan moved out at least seven months, ago. 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 forms," he began, "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, confirming that he wasn't comfortable in the Shrink's office. Not a hunter, just an average working stiff with a city job. His chair was backed as far away from the red line as it could go. No typhoid germs for him. "We ran the names of these individuals through the city databases and hit a missing persons report from March this year."
"Only one?" I asked. "I figured they'd all be missing."
He shook his head. "More than one missing person from the same address, and we would have already filed an MP-2068 with you guys. But there was only one hit. NYPD has no leads, and at this point it's pretty much a dead investigation."
Given what I'd seen in Lace's apartment, that wording was appropriate. "So let me guess: The guy who lived in 701 is gone." So pretty I just had to eat him.
The man from Records nodded. "That's right, 701. Jesus Delanzo, age twenty-seven. Photographer." He looked up at me, and when I didn't say anything, he continued, "Apartment 702 was occupied by Angela Dreyfus, age thirty-four. Broker."
"Where does she live now?"
He frowned. "We don't exactly have an address for her. Just a post office box in Brooklyn, and a cell phone that doesn't answer."
"Rather anonymous, don't you think?" the Shrink said.
"And her friends and family don't think it's weird she lives in a post office box?" I asked.
"We don't know," the Records guy said. "If they're worried, they haven't filed with the NYPD."
I frowned, but the Records guy kept going. "A couple lived in the other apartment - 703. Patricia and Joseph Moore, both age twenty-eight. And guess what: Their mail forwards to the same post office box as Angela Dreyfus's, and they have the same phone number." He leaned back, crossed his legs, and smiled, rather pleased to have put such a juicy coincidence on my plate.
But his last words hadn't even gotten through to me yet. Something else was really wrong.
"That'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's where Morgan lived. Her junk mail is still showing up there."
The Records guy nodded. "The post office doesn't forward junk mail."
"But why don't you have a record of her?"
He leafed through his folder as he shook his head. "Because the landlord never filed an occupancy form for that apartment. Maybe they were letting her live there for free."
"For free? Fat chance," I said. "That's a three-grand-a-month apartment."
"Actually, more like thirty-five hundred," the Records guy corrected.
"Ouch," I said.
"The rent is not the most unsettling thing about that building, Cal," the Shrink said. "There was something else Records didn't notice until you prompted them to look."
The guy glanced sheepishly down at his papers. "It's not anything we usually flag for investigation. But it is ... odd." 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 mean, the part that's underground?"
He nodded. "They didn'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 subbasements descending into the granite bedrock, spreading out wider than the building overhead. Room for a two-floor health club, supposedly."
"Health club in the basement." I shrugged. "Not surprising 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 very ... porous. 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 swallowed. Every old city in the world has a Night Watch of some kind, and they all get nervous when the citizens start digging. The asphalt is there for a very good reason - to put something solid between you and the things that live underneath.
"It's possible that this excavation has opened the lower environs," the Shrink said, "allowing something old to bubble up."
"You think they uncovered a reservoir?"
Neither of them said anything.
Remember what I said about rats carrying the disease? How broods store the parasite in their blood when their peeps die? Those broods can last a long time after the peeps are gone, spreading the disease down generations 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, shaking my head. "That's what people get for working out."
"It may be more than a reservoir, Cal. There may be larger things than rats and peeps to worry about." The Shrink paused. "And then ... there are the owners."
"The owners?" I asked.
The man from Records glanced at the Shrink, and the Shrink looked at me.
"A first family," she said.
"Oh, crap," I answered. One thing 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's cousin or uncle or indentured servant. Certain loyalties go back a long way, and in blood.
"Who are they? Boerums? Stuys?"
The Shrink'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 meet. Mercer Ryder's farm was up north a ways - he grew wheat in a field off Verdant Lane, although that field is called Times Square these days. And they had more farmland in Brooklyn. They were good 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 swallowed. "My progenitor's name is Morgan Ryder."
"Then we have a problem," said the Shrink.
The guy from Records, whose name was Chip, took me down to his cubicle. We were going over the history of the Hoboken PATH tunnel, which was a lot more exciting than you'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'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 are ... newer." 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 animals that live under the ground, it's actually more than everything that lives above. About a billion organisms in every pinch of soil."
"Yeah, none of which is big enough to eat twenty people."
He lowered his voice. "But that's what happens after you're buried, Kid. Things in the ground eat you."
Great, now Records was calling me Kid. "Okay, Chip," I said. "But worms don't eat people who are still alive."
"But there's a food chain down there," he said. "Something has to be at the top."
"You guys don't have a clue, do you?"
Chip shook his head. "We have clues. Those tunnels? They're a lot like the trails of an earthworm through the dirt."
I frowned and dropped my eyes back to the blueprints for Lace's building. The fine-lined drawings - precisely scaled and covered in tiny symbols - showed only the shapes that human machines had carved from the soil. No hint at the environment surrounding our descent into the earth. "So you think there are giant worms down there? I thought you guys in Records were a little more ... factual."
"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 somebody should have noticed - and then filed a great big ST-57." The pen tapped. "The excavation goes too deep for comfort; it's only a few yards above part of the exhaust system for the PATH tunnel. Any variation from these plans, and they'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're pumping oxygen down there!" Chip shook his head, tossed the pen disgustedly down onto the plans. "That's like pouring fertilizer on your weeds. Lack of oxygen is the growth-limiting factor in a subterranean biome!"
"Ah, so things are growing. But those 'explosions' in Jersey were a hundred and twenty years ago, after all. We're just talking rats these days, right?"
"Probably," Chip said.
"Probably. Wonderful." Standing there in the gloom, I realized that Chip and I were underground right now, tons of bricks and mortar piled up over our heads. The squeaking ceiling fan 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 worms, and the bigger things that ate the worms, and the bigger things that ate them...
"But our guys at the PATH say that there are a few places under the exhaust towers that their workers have abandoned," Chip added. "They aren't officially condemned, but nobody goes down there anymore."
"Great. And how close is that to Morgan's building?"
"Not far. A couple hundred yards?"
My nose wrinkled, as if a bad smell had wafted into the cubicle. Why couldn't I have just lost my virginity the normal way? No vampiric infections, no subterranean menaces. "Okay, so what's the best way for me to get down there?"
"Through the front door." Chip ran a finger across the building plans, pointing out a set of symbols. "They've got 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 problem. I'd rather break in. I'm good with locks."
Chip raised an eyebrow.
"Or a Sanitation badge," I flailed. "Maybe a Health Inspector of Health Clubs?"
"What happened between you and her?"
"Nothing!"
"You can tell me, Kid."
I groaned, but Chip fixed me with his big brown eyes. "Look, it's just that she... We had this..." My voice fell. "There was a Superhuman Revelation Incident, sort of."
"There was?" Chip frowned. "Have you filed an SRI-27/45?"
"No, I haven't filed an SRI-27/45. It's not like she saw me climbing up a wall or anything. All I did was sort of... lift her up, and only for a second."
"And?"
"And swing her from one balcony to another. Otherwise we were going to get caught breaking and entering. Just entering, I mean - nothing was broken." I decided not to get into the Grand Theft Blender issue. "Look, Chip, all I need are some traps and a Pest Control badge. Catch a few rats, let the Doctor test their blood, see if we've got a running reservoir. First things first. No big deal."
Chip nodded slowly, then looked down and continued detailing the lower depths of the Hoboken PATH tunnel, letting his expression say it all.
"Pretty late, isn't it?"
"Tell me about it," I grunted at the doorman, willing him not to look too closely at my face. He was the same guy from that afternoon, but now I was dressed in a standard city-issue hazmat suit, a wool cap pulled down to my eyebrows. My oven-fresh Sanitation badge was flopped open in his face. In more ways than one, I was presenting a different picture than I had nine hours before.
"Yeah, I'm on till midnight myself," he said, his eyes dropping from my face as he pulled out a desk drawer. He hadn't recognized me. The clothes do make the man, as far as most people are concerned.
He yanked out a clattering ring of keys, and we headed to the elevator.
"Did you guys get a complaint from one of our tenants? I never heard nothing about rats here."
"No, just some problems nearby. Population explosion by the river."
"Yeah, the river. Always smells damp down in the basement. Kind of fishy." The elevator door opened. He leaned one shoulder against it, blocking its attempts to close while he counted through the keys until he found one marked with a green plastic ring. He slipped it into a keyhole marked B2 at the bottom of the controls and gave it a half turn.
"You ever heard of a tenant getting bitten here?" I asked. "Maybe a year ago or so?"
He looked up at me. "Didn't work here then. No one did. They hired all new staff early this year. The old guys were running some kind of payroll scam, I hear."
"Ah. I see." I made a mental note to run all those doormen's and janitors' names through Records.
He pressed the B2 button, keeping one hand on the door's rubber bumpers. "Not that hardly that many people use it down there. Only a few diehards. Like I said, smells funny. By the way, when you come back up, don't forget to mention you're leaving to whoever's on the door. It's supposed to be locked up down there this time of night."
"No problem." I lifted my duffel bag in weary half salute.
He smiled and let the door close. The elevator took me down.
It did smell funny.
There were about fifty kinds of mold growing down there, and I could smell the rot of wooden beams behind the walls, dried human sweat on the padded weight benches, assorted shoes decaying behind the slats of locker doors.
But behind the health club smells, something else was brewing. I couldn't quite figure out what. Smells are not as easy to place as sights and sounds. They're like suppressed memories: You sometimes have to let them bubble up on their own.
I let the elevator close its door and glide away, not switching on any lights. I didn't want the doorman watching me on the security cameras. I was hoping he would forget I was down here and go off his shift without mentioning me to the next guy.
Once my eyes adjusted, the red glow of the thermostats and exercise machine controls were enough to see by. For a few minutes, though, I just stood there, listening for the sounds of tiny feet.
It didn't seem a likely spot for a rat invasion; there wasn't any source of food down here, not even a candy machine. In any case, street-level garbage eaters weren't the only issue here. I was looking for big alpha rats - and, if Chip was right, unnamed other things - bubbling up from below. Things that had never heard of M&M's.
All I could hear was the refrigerator in the juice machine, the hiss of steam heat, and a distant steady rumble. I knelt and pressed one palm flat against the floor, feeling the vibration spreading into my flesh along with the chill of the cement. The rumble was cycling slowly - maybe it was those eighty-foot fan blades that gave Chip nightmares.
But I didn't hear any rats, or any of Chip's monsters, for that matter. I moved among the dark shapes of machines, the red eyes of their controls winking at me. The smell of chlorine rose from a covered Jacuzzi. That other scent, the one I couldn't identify, seemed to grow stronger as I moved toward the back wall.
Then I felt a draft, the slightest hint of cold. I swept my eyes across the baseboard behind the radiator, searching for a rat-hole letting in the autumn chill of the earth. Rats don't need much space to crawl through; they can break down their own skeletons and squeeze through holes the size of quarters. (We peeps can supposedly do that too, but it hurts like hell, I've heard.)
There weren't any openings along the floor. The fittings around the steam pipes were tight. I didn't spot any doors to slip under, no loose tiles in the ceiling. No way for anything to bubble up from the depths.
But in the farthest corner of the gym, the paneled walls themselves radiated cold.
I gave the wall a thump.
It was hollow.
Hearing the empty sound, I realized something about the darkened health club - it didn't have any stairs down. The second level promised in the blueprints didn't exist. Or it was hidden.
My duffel bag clanked against the concrete floor. From a pocket, I pulled the plans that Chip had printed for me, checking my compass. According to the blueprints, the sub-basement stairs were only a few yards away, on the other side of the wall.
The wood paneling didn't give at all when I pushed; there was something solid behind it. Of course, my duffel bag was full of drills, hacksaws, bolt cutters, and a crowbar, or I could have just put my fist through the wall. But I still had to come back in my Sanitation costume to reclaim any rats my traps caught, and the staff doesn't like it when you break their building.
I moved along the wall, pressing and thumping. The echoes were muffled, which meant that lots of crisscrossed S beams supported the paneling. The stairs were solidly sealed off as well, with no easy way in. Had they just abandoned a whole subbasement down there?
The wood paneling ended at a row of lockers - too heavy to move, even with my peep muscles. I tapped the floor with my feet, wondering what was hidden beneath. From the ceiling, the red eyes of security cameras glowed mockingly in the darkness.
Then I realized something: All of the cameras were pointed more or less at me. Were they tracking me?
I moved a few yards, back into the cold corner, but the cameras didn't follow. They all stayed pointed at the same target - the row of lockers. Whoever had set the security system up didn't care what happened in the rest of the health club, as long as they could watch that one spot.
I walked along the lockers, running my fingers against them, smelling the dirty socks and chlorinated swimsuits inside. The metal grew colder as I went.
In the center, one locker was icy to my touch, and through its ventilation slats that half-familiar scent - the one I couldn't quite identify - floated on a draft of chilled air. I looked up at the cameras; they were all pointed directly at me now.
The padlock was an off-the-shelf Master Lock, though with four tumblers instead of the usual three, more expensive than the others. I knelt, cradling it like a cell phone to my head. As the numbers spun left, then right, I heard the tiny steel teeth connecting, the tumblers aligning ... until it sprang open, as loud as a gunshot in my ear.
Sliding the lock off the hasp, I opened the door.
There was nothing inside - nothingness, in fact. No hanging clothes, no hooks or shelves, just a black void that consumed the dim light of the gym. A chill wind came from the darkness, bearing that same half-familiar smell, sharpened now.
I reached into the locker. My hand went back into the darkness and cold, disappearing into nothingness.
Let me get this straight about my night vision: When I'm at home, the only light I keep on is the red LED of my cell-phone charger; I can read fine print by starlight; I have to tape over the glowing clock face of my DVD player, because otherwise it's too bright to sleep in my bedroom.
But I couldn't see jack inside this locker.
There is something called cave darkness, which is ten times darker than sitting in a closet with towels stuffed under the door, covering your eyes with your hands - basically darker than anything you've ever experienced except down in a cave. Your hands disappear in front of your face, you can't tell whether your eyes are open or not, random red lights seem to flicker in your peripheral vision as your brain freaks out from the total absence of light.
"Great," I said.
Hoisting my duffel bag, I slipped through into the void.
The standard Night Watch flashlight has three settings. One is a low-light mode designed not to burn out peep night vision. The second setting is a normal flashlight, useful for normal people. The third is a ten-thousand-lumen eyeball-blaster intended to blow away peeps, scare away rat hordes, and generally indicate panic. Held a few inches from your skin, it will actually give you a suntan.
Switching on the tiny light, I found myself in a narrow hallway, squeezed between the foundation's cement wall and the back side of the maniacally reinforced wood paneling. The floor was covered with little globs of something gooey. I knelt and sniffed and realized what I'd been smelling all along - peanut butter, mixed with the chalky funk of rat poison. Someone had laid out about a hundred jars of weaponized extra-crunchy back here. The bottom of the false wall was smeared with it to prevent the wood paneling from being gnawed through.
I stepped carefully among the gooey smears, and the hallway led me back to the corner where the missing stairs should have been. An industrial-strength metal door stood there, reinforced with yards of chain and generous wads of steel wool stuffed into the crack beneath it.
Steel wool is one thing rats can't chew through. Someone was working conscientiously on the rat issue. Hopefully that meant Chip was crazy on the giant monster issue, and all there was down here was some peep's long-lost brood.
The chains wound back and forth between the door's push-bar handle and a steel ring cemented into the wall, secured with big, fat padlocks that took keys instead of combinations. To save time, I pulled bolt cutters from my bag and snipped the chains. As taut as rubber bands, they snapped loose and clattered to the floor.
Funny, I thought, chains don't keep out rats.
Ignoring that uncomfortable fact, I gave the door a good hard push; it scraped inward a few inches. Through the gap, the promised stairs led downward into smellier smells and colder air and darker darkness. Sounds filtered up: little feet scurrying, the snufflings of tiny noses, the nibblings of razor-sharp teeth. An all-night rat fiesta - but what were they eating down there?
Not chocolate, was my guess.
I pulled on thick rubber gloves.
The gap was just big enough to squeeze through. As I descended, I kept one thumb on the flashlight's eyeball-blaster switch, ready to blaze away if there was a peep down here. I couldn't hear anything bigger than a rat, but, as I've said, parasite-positives can hold their breath for a long time.
The rats must have heard me cutting the chains, but they didn't sound nervous. Did they get a lot of visitors?
At the bottom of the stairs, my night vision began to adjust to the profound darkness, and the basement eased into focus. At first I thought the floor was slanted, then I saw that a long swimming pool dominated the room, sloping away from me. The paired arcs of chrome ladders glowed on either side, and a diving board thrust out from the edge of the deep end.
The pool contained something much worse than water, though.
Along its bottom skittered a mass of rats, a boiling surface of pale fur, slithering tails, and tiny rippling muscles. They scrambled along the pool's edges, gathered in feeding frenzies around piles of something I couldn't see. All of them had the wormy look of deep-underground rats, slowly losing their gray camouflage - and ultimately even their eyesight - as they spent generation after generation out of the sun.
A fair number of ratty skeletons were lined up on one side of the basement, bare ribs as thin as toothpicks - as if someone had put out glue traps in a neat row.
There were a lot of smells (as you might imagine) but one stood out among the others, raising my hackles. It was the scent mark of a predator. In Hunting 101, we had been taught to call it by its active molecule: 4-mercapto-4-methylpentan-2-1. But most folks just call it "cat pee."
What the hell was a cat doing down here? Sure, there are feral felines in New York. But they live on the surface, in abandoned buildings and vacant lots, within paw's reach of humanity. They stay out of the Underworld, and rats stay away from them. When it comes to rats, cats are on our side.
If one had stumbled down here, it would be lean pickings by now.
I forced that last image from my mind and reached into the duffel bag for an infrared camera. Its little screen winked to life, turning the horde of rats into a blobby green snowstorm. I set the camera on the pool's edge, pointing down into the maelstrom. Dr. Rat and her Research and Development pals could watch this stuff for hours.
Then I realized something: I didn't smell chlorine.
With my nose, even a swimming pool that's been drained for years retains that tangy chemical scent. The pool had never been filled, which meant that the rat invasion had happened before they'd finished construction down here. I looked at the pool: The black line at water height had been half started, then abandoned.
I remembered Dr. Rat's standard checklist: My first job was to figure out if this brood had access to the surface. I began a slow walk around the edge of the basement, flashlight still set low, moving carefully, looking for any holes in the walls.
The rats hardly noticed me. If this was the brood that had infected Morgan, they would find my scent comforting - our parasites were closely related, after all. On the other hand, true Underworld rats might behave this way with anyone. Never having seen a human being before, their little pink eyes wouldn't know what to make of me.
The walls looked solid, not even hairline cracks in the cement. Of course, this building was just over a year old - the foundation should have been rat-proof for another decade or so.
I peered over the edge. In the deep end, right where the drain should have been, was a boiling mass of rats. Pale bodies struggled against one another, some disappearing into the mass, others thrashing their way up and out. The brood did have a way out of this basement, I realized, but it didn't go up to the surface...
It went down.
I swallowed. The Night Watch would want to know exactly how big this opening was. Merely rat-size? Or were bigger things afoot?
I walked slowly back around to the shallow end of the pool and picked up the infrared camera. With it in one hand and the flashlight in the other, I put one tentative foot into the pool.
The sole of my boot didn't make a sound. A layer of something soft was strewn across against the bottom of the pool, fluttering beneath the claws of darting rats. It was too dark to see what.
Something ran across my boot, and I shuddered.
"Okay, guys, let's observe some personal space here," I said, then took another step.
Something answered my words, something that wasn't a rat. A long, high-pitched moan echoed through the room, like the sound of a mewling infant...
At the very end of the diving board, two reflective eyes opened, and another annoyed growl rumbled out.
A cat was looking at me, its sleepy eyes floating against invisibly black fur. A host of big, gnarly alpha rats sat around it on the diving board, like kingly attendants to an emperor, when they should have been running for their lives.
The eyes blinked once, strangely red in the flashlight's glow. The cat looked like a normal cat of normal-cat size, but this was not a normal place for any cat to be.
But cats didn't carry the parasite. If they did, we'd all be peeps by now. They live with us, after all.
My eyes fell from the feline's unblinking gaze, and I saw what the rats were eating: pigeons. Their feathers were the soft layer lining the pool. The cat was hunting for its brood, just like a peep would. And I heard a sound below the ratty squeaks - the cat purring softly, as if trying to calm me down.
It was family to me.
Suddenly, the floor began trembling, a vibration that traveled up through my cowboy boots and into my muscle-clenched stomach. My vision began to shudder, as if an electric toothbrush had been jammed into my brain. A new smell rose up from the swimming pool drain, something I couldn't recognize - ancient and foul, it made me think of rotten corpses. It made me want to run screaming.
And through it all, the cat's low purr of satisfaction filled the room.
I squeezed my eyes shut and switched the flashlight to full power.
I could only hear (and feel) what happened next: a thousand rats panicking, pouring out of the pool to race for the dark corners of the room, flowing past my legs in a furry torrent. Hundreds more scrambled to escape down the drain and into the darkness below, their claws scraping the broken concrete as they fought to flee the horrifying light. Bloated rat king bodies flopped from the diving board and landed on the struggling mass, squealing like squeaky toys dropped from a height.
I fumbled a pair of sunglasses out of a pocket, got them on, and opened one eye a slit: The cat was unperturbed, still curled at the end of the diving board, eyes shut against the light, looking like an ordinary cat lying happily in the sun. It yawned.
The trembling of the floor had begun to fade, and the traffic jam of escaping rats was starting to break up. The drain hole looked to be more than a yard across; the deep end of the pool had cracked open, crumbling into some larger cavity below. The rats were still roiling, disappearing into it like crap down a flushing toilet.
Squinting up at the cat again, I saw that it had risen to its feet. It was stretching lazily, yawning, its tongue curling pink and obscene.
"You just stay there, kitty," I called above the din, and took another step toward the drain. How deep was the hole? Cat-size? Peep-size? Monster-size?
I only needed one glimpse and I was out of there.
Between my blazing flashlight and the squeaks and scrambling feet echoing off the sides of the pool, I was almost blind and practically deafened. But the weird smell of death was fading, and just as the last rats were finally clearing out, I caught the slightest whiff of something new in the air. Something close ...
A sharp hiss sounded behind me, someone sucking in air. As I spun around, the flashlight slipped from my sweaty fingers...
It cracked on the swimming pool floor, and everything went very dark.
I was completely blind, but before the flashlight had died I'd glimpsed a human form at the edge of the pool. Following the bright image burned into my retinas, I ran the few steps up the slope and leaped from the pool, raising the camera like a club.
As I swung, I caught her smell again, freezing just in time.
Jasmine shampoo, mixed with human fear and peanut butter... and I knew who it was.
"Cal?" Lace said.
