Underground

CHAPTER 11

Quinton knew his way around the library better than anyone other than an employee—and possibly better than some of them. I wasn’t entirely thrilled with the Koolhaas building but I didn’t think it an eyesore. No, the eyesore was the screaming-yellow escalator enclosure with its strange display of two faces and a giant eyeball projected on mostly spherical blobs that were seen through rough holes in the escalator’s interior wall. Shafts of light seemed to transfix the misshapen faces and eye, making them look like alien trophies as they writhed, mouthing silent words and blinking with disembodied lids. I couldn’t look at it for long. The wiggling, flickering faces reminded me too much of things out of my earliest Grey nightmares.

Quinton caught me turning away. “Disconcerting.” “That’s a word for it.”

He smiled and we came out of the escalator tunnel into the “mixing chamber”—a huge room that took up the whole floor with clusters of worktables, chairs, standing carrels, shelves, and counters where patrons and librarians were supposed to “mix” to find information. Mostly people seemed to gather in clumps and chatter among themselves, so the room had a constant low din like a tropical jungle. Quinton sought out one of the librarians who was wearing a wireless mic headset like a stagehand in a large, professional theater. After a moments conversation the librarian shook his head.

“Sorry, can’t put you on the staff computer right now. Leslie’s got it. The regular computers are open and they’re pretty fast. Here, let me grab you one.”

He darted across the chamber to a computer in a standing carrel. I thought it was a good thing we wouldn’t be using it very long, since the stand-up desk height was well designed to discourage lingering. In spite of the proximity to closing time, most of the computers in the room—and there were a lot—were in use. Many of the patrons looked high school or college age, and I guessed from the fevered looks on some of their faces that they were racing to find materials for papers due the next day. A lot of the library branches weren’t open on Sundays, so this was the natural place to come if you were running late and didn’t have Internet access at home. I wondered how many papers were being plagiarized outright in the last-minute panic.

Quinton ran a quick search and we made a list of newspaper archive dates and issues, which I carried back to the librarian with the headset. He called to someone using the device, and a stack of bound journals and microfiche cards was delivered to me in a few minutes. I put them on a table near Quinton and went to look at his progress before I dove into them.

He was glaring at a page full of prompts and code strings on the computer screen and typing with angry slashing strokes.

I put a hand on his shoulder. “What’s wrong?” I asked.

He turned his eyes up to look at me. “I wanted to check some other sources—in case there’s been anything like this elsewhere.” He looked back to the screen and frowned. “This archive is being coy—it wants a bunch of login passwords it never asked for before. Someone thinks they’re being secure but it’s just a pain in the butt. I’ll back-door it…” He patted my hand and drew his away to return to the keyboard.

“OK. I’ve got a pile of stuff from the newspaper archive. Have you found any information about the Sistu yet?”

“Not yet… I’ll finish this and get to the folklore section…” His concentration was on the screen and the task of getting around the system’s security. He didn’t see me nod, didn’t notice the withdrawal of my hand, so focused was his attention. I couldn’t begrudge that—I was the same way on a case sometimes. But I wondered what archive he was getting into that fascinated him so, since I couldn’t imagine anything in the library that would have that sort of security—or anything we were looking for that would need it. Quinton intrigued me, but it wasn’t for his transparency or simple life.

I skimmed through the old Post-Intelligencer issues, taking notes on all the deaths or other strange occurrences that seemed to fit our pattern in the right date ranges.

The records before the fire didn’t show anything that was a match—even a rough match. The first odd death happened in April of 1890, during the rebuilding, when the Kline and Rosenberg building on Washington between Commercial and Second collapsed during construction. One of the workmen had been buried under the falling bricks and was found dead and missing an arm and a leg once the bricks were shifted out of the hole. The missing limbs were never recovered and the collapse was blamed on piers that hadn’t been sunk deep enough into the mud and sawdust landfill that made up that part of town.

I had to find a map of the original plat to realize that the site in question was now the northwest corner of Occidental Park—Washington Street was still the same, but at the time Oxy had been called Second Avenue and First Avenue was called Commercial Street. The same location where I’d seen the tumbledown building in the city’s memory of 1949. I wondered if it could have been the replacement Kline and Rosenberg building.

Another project on Washington—the Brodeck and Schlesinger building between Third and Fourth—fell down a month later while its second floor was under construction. It was no wonder they’d turned the area into a park, since it seemed to be bad luck for buildings. Between the two events I spotted records of several more deaths with the same hallmarks. After the second building went down, though, the deaths had stopped. I didn’t know what had put an end to them—the reason for the collapse was again given as unstable piers—but I knew from experience that it was possible for magic to bring down a building and wondered if that was the real cause of the second building’s fall.

As I read forward, that period of Seattle’s history was full of freakish events, from the city’s project to raise the streets—but not the sidewalks—that had resulted in the deep corridors I’d visited, to the “inadvertent suicide” of an unlucky pedestrian who fell from the streets above. There were other odd deaths, but I didn’t find another death by monster until that of a transient named Charles Olander in 1949. I assumed this was Chuck-o, and I felt pretty sure I was right when I read that his body had been found at the other end of Occidental, near the current football stadium, where some pipes had broken in the street during the quake. That would have been a block or less from the old Duncan and Sons shop with its life-size plaster horse standing on a platform over the sidewalk.

Quinton sat down next to me, brushing a hand down my back and jarring me out of my thoughts about whatever was feeding on people beneath the streets.

“Not much on the Sistu,” he said. “A lot of the Native American and local legend books are at the Ballard branch. And the other archives didn’t turn up anything like it outside the Seattle area for any time period, so it’s not a moving phenomenon—nor is it government related or monitored that I could discover. It’s localized.”

“Why would the government—” I started.

A voice came from overhead, telling us the library would be closing in five minutes. I tried my question again, but Quinton shook me off. I picked up my notes and got ready to go back out into the cold.

Once outside he said, “The government gets into a lot of strange research, so I checked an old info source of mine to see if there was anything like this, but I didn’t get a hit. What did you get?”

“Not as much as I’d like,” I admitted, sighing. “But there is a matching geographic area and everything happened down on the street level south of the skid road—it used to be Mill Street, but they changed the name to Yesler Way during the rebuilding.

“The first related death was right after the fire. A couple of buildings collapsed down on Washington Street—the northern border of the bricks. There were several deaths in the area from Washington to what’s now Royal Brougham between April when the first building went down and May when the second one went. I don’t know what made the deaths stop, but it coincides with the second building’s collapse. The southernmost body was found the day the second building fell, down in a dumping ground which was in the same location as the current hotel project at Occidental and Royal Brougham. Apparently that area had been used as a dump for a while—debris from the fire was hauled there too—and that wasn’t the first or the last body ever found there.”

“I’d bet that was the Seattle equivalent of dumping the bodies in the East River in New York,” Quinton said, starting to walk. “You can’t drop them into Elliot Bay, since they’d come back on the next high tide, or stick in the mudflats at low tide.”

My own stride was slower than his, my knee now feeling stiff and swollen. “Yeah. Looks like a lot of stuff came back at high tide. The paper had the tide table on the front of every edition because the sewer backflushed whenever the tide came in so… you had to know when it was safe to flush your toilet. With that kind of tidal action, I doubt anyone dumped anything in the bay that they wanted to see the last of.”

Quinton paused and matched his pace to mine. “Hell, no. What if Uncle Peter suddenly came back from his fatal fishing trip to embarrass everyone with a suspicious bullet wound or something?”

I smiled. “What if, indeed? But don’t you think it’s funny: they raised the streets for toilets? I wonder if it still gets wet down on the old street level at high tide…”

“I can attest it does not. The seawall keeps Elliot Bay at bay. For the most part. There are seeps of course but the buildings have pumps and drains in the basements.”

“Another undergrounder secret?”

“Nope. A Seattle utilities problem. It’s a whole new definition of rising damp, considering the current downtown sidewalks are about thirty feet above the old sidewalks, so to keep the sewer lines at a good angle, the streets farther up the bluff must be about… seventy feet above their original levels, maybe more.”

“Impressive engineering.”

Quinton eyed me with a silly, self-conscious smile. “Yes, indeed.”

I laughed and didn’t even feel guilty. “Is that flirting?”

“That’s what it said on the instructions. Did I do it badly?”

“No, but don’t let it get out of hand,” I warned with a lack of sincerity.

“No, ma’am,” he replied, smothering a chuckle. He made his face serious. “All right, all right. Back to work. So we know the area is the same for all the significant deaths and that whatever is causing them comes and goes.”

“I think our monster’s trapped down there,” I said.

“It seems to get around if it wants to,” Quinton replied.

“Only up to a point. It doesn’t wander far from the core of the bricks and never has so long as white men have been keeping records. We don’t know that its this Sistu, but it’s the only monster anyone’s come up with and it’s of native origin and, as you said, the phenomenon is localized to Seattle’s tenderloin. It seems to turn up when things get torn apart in the historic district, which used to be the mudflats—Indian fishing grounds. We don’t know when or how it was last put to bed, but it does seem to have a limit or a way to box it up. This creature doesn’t just run amok forever. We don’t know enough about the history of the underground to know exactly what’s been done down there or when that might have unleashed and later banished this thing.”

“We need to take the tour.”

“What?”

“The Underground Tour. I think they’ve got one late tour left today, if we hurry.” Quinton grabbed my elbow to support me and began to jog down the snowcrusted street toward Pioneer Square. “Can you run? C’mon. The historian may know something if we catch him.”

“The Underground Tour? Its a tourist trap,” I objected, skittering and wincing along behind him.

“Yeah,” he agreed, “but its about real history. They spin it for the guests, but the facts are still the same. If anyone knows anything about the history of the underground and the strange things that happened in it, it’ll be the tour people.”

We slid and slipped down the hill to the Square and made it in at the back of the last tour of the day. We’d missed the introductory speech, but since the group was small, and the weather lousy, the woman at the ticket window let us join the group as they headed out to the totem pole. Our guide was a tall, lanky man in his fifties with one lazy eye and hair that had faded from red to gingery beige. His voice was clear and loud without being a shout and his patter was funny enough to distract the small group from stamping their chilling feet too much.

“I know its pretty cold out here so I’m going to keep this part short and get us in under the street in just a minute. A lot of the area we’re going to be walking through is condemned and of course it’s all private property, so you’ll want to stay close to me and not wander off. Its perfectly safe so long as you stay on the wooden walkways and cleared paths—our rats are all union here and they don’t like to cross any lines, but they do occasionally pick off stragglers, so your best bet is to stay with the group and… are there any children here…? No? Oh, well… usually we call ‘em bait, but you adults will have to take your chances.”

That got a laugh.

Our guide, whose name we’d missed, talked briefly about the totem pole—stolen by the city fathers on a trip to Alaska, burned in the fire, and replaced at the cost of the old pole plus the new one—and the pergola, which had been built as a trolley stop, knocked down by a runaway truck and rebuilt.

“Unfortunately,” our guide went on, “when the repaired pergola was reinstalled, the city felt that the area needed more support and poured tons of concrete down into the space below to shore up the street corner—didn’t know there was anything down there did you? But there is. The classiest underground restroom you will never see. Like the pergola, it was built for the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition of 1909 and was billed as the most luxurious ‘subterranean comfort station’ in the world at the time. Marble floors, murals, a shoe shine station, a barber, even a tailor’s stall to make repairs to your clothes. People came from all over the world to inspect our restroom and build subterranean comfort stations of their own.”

One of the tourists held up a hand and asked if the comfort station was still there.

Our guide shook his head. “Yes, but unfortunately it’s now sealed behind that load of cement the city poured in. These large, decorative lamp standards around the Square are actually ventilation shafts for the comfort station down below—just like the uprights in the pergola. And speaking of down below, let’s get in there.”

The group trailed the tall guide across the Square and street and down First Avenue half a block, the guide talking at each pause about whatever the group happened to be standing near. The pace was slow enough and the distance short enough that I had no difficulty keeping up, in spite of my complaining knee.

The guide opened a gate and led us all down a flight of metal-framed stairs and through a metal door to an area of brick arches similar to the place where Quinton and I had found the vampire attacking Jay. We continued under the sidewalk on a walkway of creaking boards, past piles of discarded junk, while our guide filled us in on the history of the underground and how it came to be.

We followed him north, through a hole in the wall, to where a sudden burst of light came down from work lights strung near the ceiling. A lot of broken furniture, pipes, cans, and other strange objects leaned in the far corner. We took a dogleg turn and came out into an L-shaped room with a door into a building on the inside corner. Flickering light came in through the ceiling and a once-fancy sign with lightbulb sockets and blue and white enamel stood canted in a corner spelling out “SAM’S____________________” something; the second half was missing. The guide stood in the middle of the room under the odd light.

I felt much colder in that area and got an unpleasant sensation of something crawling on my skin. I edged a little farther into the room, putting my back to the stone wall near the door in the corner, but couldn’t escape from the feeling of dread. The room was fairly boiling with Grey and bright with blazing energy lines in hot yellow and blue, but I couldn’t see an immediate source for my discomfort.

“We’re now directly under the corner of Yesler and First,” the guide began.

So this was the “worst corner” in the underground according to the Indians, where a native shaman had driven away a pack of ghosts. Maybe that was an explanation for the energy levels and my disquiet.

“You’re standing now at the original street level of Seattle. Now, back in the 1860s through 1880s this was all mudflats, and as we told you upstairs, it got a little wet at high tide. So after the fire, the city had a great opportunity to raise the streets up from the tide line and make downtown safe, dry, and sewage free. But raising the streets was a huge undertaking—and undertaking is the right word here because although no one died during the fire, a few people did die in the streets and especially the sidewalks afterward.”

He pointed up to the modern sidewalk above us. “This was all open for several years while the streets went up. So the people who wanted to get into the buildings to shop or do business would come down a ladder or stair at the end of the block and walk along the sidewalks down here. Unfortunately, they occasionally missed the ladders and fell to their deaths. This was about the same time miners on the way to the Klondike were pouring into Seattle. Heavy merchandise from the shops often ended up stacked on the streets and sometimes a box or barrel would fall into the open sidewalks and kill a pedestrian here below. So you can see it was a real adventure going shopping downtown in those days.”

He smiled and the tourists smiled back until he continued, “Now, I hope none of you folks are afraid of ghosts, because this corner is reputed to be the most haunted part of the underground we’re going to walk through today. But don’t worry, we’ve never lost a guest. No matter how hard we try.”

A few of our fellow tourists glanced at each other with shaky bravado and I, of course, didn’t say they’d been shoulders-deep in phantoms since they’d parked their cars.

As he went on about the bank that had originally occupied the building, I found myself peering around with trepidation, staring more sharply at shapes and shadows than I might have.

“Now, I’ve never seen it,” the guide continued, “but several of the other tour guides and the crew of a TV show that filmed down here say they’ve seen the ghost of a young man at this corner. He is thought to have been a bank teller who worked in this bank right here. The story goes that he was killed by a miner in a dispute over a… lady of negotiable affection.”

The crowd tittered, but I recoiled as something that was definitely not a young man dead or alive loomed up in the icy cold, malforming the lines of energy that strung through the space like a net.

“Bitch,” someone whispered in the silvered gloom of the Grey. I looked for the speaker but could only spot a moving columnar disturbance in the thin mist and bright lines. Whoever or whatever it was didn’t have enough power to come any further out of the paranormal, and I was just as glad of that, considering the vicious tone of its voice.

Unaware of the uncanny member of our group, the tour guide was explaining the glass prisms embedded in the sidewalks above that cast light down into the buried level. As he talked about the manganese that turned the prisms purple over time, I felt the unseen thing halt in front of me, twined in lines of energy like an insect in a carnivorous vine.

“Don’t interfere with me,” it murmured.

Startled, I jerked back. “What?” I hadn’t expected something so barely present to be aware of me, much less so angry.

“Meddler, busybody…” the thing whispered. The lines flared as it surged toward me, and fell back, restrained by whatever spell those strands of elemental energy wove. I racked my brain. I knew what this thing was if I could just recall…

“Do I know you?” I asked. The woman on one side of me glanced my way then back to the tour guide when she realized I wasn’t talking to her. Quinton touched his hand to mine but didn’t make a bigger move—he knew I faced something he couldn’t see or hurt.

“No,” the whisper replied—I could hardly think of it as more—and the connection was made. It was a discarnate revenant. I’d met a manifest revenant before and not enjoyed the experience, but never a discarnate. Powerful in life and aware in death but entirely incorporeal, they were generally angry, frustrated, and malevolent. They’re the things that whisper madness and suicide into the ears of the receptive and depressed. A shred of some powerful thing that had died or been exorcised incompletely, this one must have been the remains of something the native medicine man had tried to remove but could only weaken enough to bind it to this place. Nasty bits of psychic personality, all revenants were aware of everything around them, even if they couldn’t affect it, and that made for a vicious and tricky ghost. Since this one knew who I was, it probably knew what I was looking for.

I edged away from my corporeal neighbors and muttered, “Tell you what, I’ll leave you alone if you tell me where to find the Sistu.”

I felt it laugh more than heard it. “Find death where there is no light, no comfort, between the tides, in a pool that is not a pool.” It laughed again and faded away, letting the energy of the Indians magic slide back into its warding shape.

Well, I thought, it had been worth a try. And at least the nasty thing was gone, I added with a shudder. Whatever it had been in life, it was one unpleasant customer in the afterlife. The unsettling feeling of the room eased when the invisible creature left.

Quinton shot me a questioning glance and wrapped my hand in his but I shook my head and mouthed, “Later.”

Our guide was asking for questions and almost ready to move on. I put my hand in the air.

“Yes. The lady in the back,” he acknowledged, pointing at me from his height over the heads of the tourists.

I put my hand down. “You mentioned the ghost of the bank teller. Are there other ghosts associated with this corner?”

“Well, not anymore,” he replied, “although there are reportedly other ghosts in the underground. A lot of tour guests used to report seeing or hearing the ghosts of Native Americans here.

It was so disturbing and frequent that a shaman was called in around… 1997, if I remember correctly, to clear the place and send the ghosts away. It must have worked, because it’s been pretty quiet since then.”

The old man we’d talked to Saturday night had been right about the ghosts, but wrong about the dates. I wondered what the Indian ghosts had been doing down here, since Fish had said that the living and the dead didn’t mix. What would have made them linger and why had they associated with the revenant? Did they have anything to do with the Sistu—if that was the monster we were chasing—or with putting it back in its box in the past?

As I’d been thinking, the group had begun to troop out and go on around the corner into the bank vault. Quinton and I trailed them but saw no other lingering shades as we rejoined the tour group and climbed some stairs to exit into the ragged end of Post Street.

We listened to more patter about the underground and followed our guide to cross First again and trailed up the street to enter a narrow building at 115 Yesler.

Except it wasn’t a building, really, but a door between buildings that held staircases going up and down. Down led again into the underground. This time we emerged inside a building—a former store showroom with a crazily sloping floor. The cement was warped, tipped, and pitched until it looked like a model mountain range.

The guide explained that the delicately stenciled plaster walls in the room led them to believe the shop had once been quite elegant. “At one time this building would have had a polished wood floor, but it’s now concealed by this concrete you see. All this concrete throughout the underground was poured in at the city’s insistence when plague broke out here in 1907.” The crowd made an uncomfortable rustling as he went on. “They thought that sealing the wooden floors and sidewalks would stop the rats and their friends from coming up through the foundations, but they didn’t think about the fact that all these buildings rest on oiled cedar pilings driven into the mud and landfill beneath, and that landfill is unstable.” Unstable enough, I thought, to bring down buildings—and trap monsters? “Most of these buildings are currently sinking at a rate of a quarter of an inch a year and have been for some time. That settling accounts for most of the uneven floors, tilted doorways, and strange noises you may encounter as we continue the tour.”

Well, that and the ghosts, I thought.

He talked a bit more about the room we were in, saying that it had been in a couple of films, including the original Night Strangler movie—a vampire story set in Seattle’s underground—that had come from the TV series The Night Stalker that I thought I might have seen as a kid, but couldn’t remember.

At last we’d exhausted the exhibits in the old shop and went out. We followed the guide past the shop’s original window-filled frontage and around the corner of Occidental to a dark area of red-bricked arcades and deep terra-cotta walls.

A few work lights in cages hung at random intervals to cast deep shadows into the mist-heavy corners. Once again the throngs of ghosts were thick—even thicker down in the underground than they’d been on the surface.

“Now we’re under Occidental Avenue, but when this was originally built, it was called Second—notice the sign up there. Once the sidewalks were completed, people still used the underground sidewalks as a sort of covered mall to avoid the rain, and the doors on the old street level remained open until the underground was officially closed in 1910 due to a second outbreak of plague.

But despite that, much of the underground never really closed at all; it just became the underworld. This stretch of Second, from where we are now to about where Qwest Field stands today, was the most crime-ridden, vice-filled, and profitable part of the whole city.

“Along this stretch there were several hundred women who listed their occupation as ‘seamstress’ and yet not a single one of them owned a sewing machine. For many years, Seattle’s Seamstress’ tax paid for the fire brigades, police, streets, and schools the more upright members of society demanded without ever having to legalize Seattle’s most lucrative trade—prostitution.”

I suppose I should have been appalled, but after having seen their ghosts—both the adult women on the street and the sad girls in the alley cribs—I wasn’t so much outraged as sad to hear my worst imaginings confirmed.

I missed something of the tour patter while I thought of those ghosts and only heard the guide say, “Once the sidewalks were installed, most of Seattle’s vice, drugs, and gambling sank to the underground levels in spite of the official closure of the underground and was still in full swing when Prohibition hit and gave the old place an infusion of new blood—highly alcoholic blood—and crime. Prostitution ceased to be our most profitable underground business in favor of bootlegging.

“Now, let’s move a little farther along here…”

As we walked down the vaulted corridor, the space was raucous to my ears—filled as it was layers of time and packs of ghosts. We paused in front of a building labeled “107 Saloon” as the guide described later efforts to preserve the underground with earthquake-proof structures and shoring up the walls that were already up to six feet thick in some places. I thought any monster that could go make a hole in the four-foot-thick walls of the Great Northern Tunnel wasn’t going to be much deterred by the stone and brick of the underground’s street buttresses, no matter how thick. I listened with only half an ear to the tales of the city’s halfhearted efforts to clean up the vice and crime in the underground—somewhat hampered by the involvement of police and politicians in the money-making end of the enterprises—while I looked around the section of sidewalk for possible phantom informants. The darkness inside the shell of the 107 Saloon wasn’t dark to me—the space was thronged with a party crowd of speakeasy patrons whooping it up among the thinner ghosts of the Klondike’s miners and lumberjacks. I glanced in at them and was struck by the sight of a familiar face.

Among the crowd of illegal drinkers, I spotted Albert—the ghost who inhabited the home of my friends Ben and Mara Danziger. For a moment, I tried to catch his attention, but I soon realized I was seeing a mere loop of history—a bit of the old buildings memory of its past. I watched Albert with narrowed eyes and recognized the quick twist of his head and the gleam on his spectacles from a far more recent encounter. I ground the feeling of unpleasant familiarity through my mind until the image and idea clicked together. He was the second spirit that had been riding the zombie I’d released under the viaduct. Damn Albert! What was the bastard up to? I’d have to find out. I didn’t like the idea that the unpredictable specter might be involved in the deaths of undergrounders. It might not be true, but I still needed to know.

I barely managed not to fall on the uneven slope of the floor as the guide led us out and up to the alley behind the Merchants Café. My knee made a popping sound as I stumbled to keep my footing. I’d need to ice it and do an extra set of stretches to keep it supple after this.

From the alley we could see down to Occidental Park—right to the lot where the Kline and Rosenberg building must have fallen.

Our guide continued his speech. “During World War Two, the military used the underground, but once the war was over, it was abandoned once again. From 1946 to 1952, the underground became a dumping ground for trash and broken furniture as well as a scavengers delight for antique collectors who stole most of the period bits and pieces including the doors right off the buildings. Without the doors, the underground became a highway for burglars, and most of the businesses in Pioneer Square were hit at one time or another by enterprising thieves who came up from the unprotected basements. It also became a haven for the homeless and several fires were started by transients trying to stay warm. In 1952, the underground was officially condemned and closed—supposedly for good,” he said.

He pointed down the alley to the park. “Normally, I’d take you down to the park for a look at the totem statues of sun and raven, the bear, orca, and Tsonoqua—the ogress called ‘nightmare bringer’—but it’s pretty cold and dark today.

They are very interesting sculptures, however, and I urge you to come back when the light and weather are better. Now, follow me across the street and we’ll wrap this up under the Pioneer Building.” As we crossed the street he told us we’d be going down one of the few original staircases still intact. “Most of these were removed in 1952 when the underground was sealed, but this one was preserved under its cover. When the lower levels of this building were reopened for business, the staircase was restored for our use. The original staircases had no rails, so try to imagine, as you descend, what it was like to use these steep, open stairs every day.” We followed him down the stair and I shivered at the thought of taking those slippery steps without a handrail. Especially if I’d been drinking like a miner or a lumberjack. No wonder people missed them and became “inadvertent suicides.”

We entered the final room of the tour, filled with strange objects that had been found in the underground. The guide pointed out a tin bathtub that had been found inside one of the walls—suspected of being used to brew up literal bathtub gin—and a bored out cedar log from the water system. There was also an early glass plate photo of a Madam Lou Graham and her “sewing circle” with a note attached that said Madam Lou’s brothel—where the photo was taken—had been housed at First and Main, probably in the building that was currently the Bread of Life Mission. Quinton and I both smothered chuckles over it. Finally, the group moved on and followed our guide into the gift shop, where Quinton and I cornered him at the cash counter.

His name was Rick and he was the tour’s historian. I introduced myself and said that we were doing some research into myths and legends of the underground.

“Well, I covered a lot of the more interesting ones on the tour,” Rick said, “but, of course, there’s more than a ninety-minute tour has time for. Some things don’t play too well, so we don’t use them on the tour, and others aren’t exactly family fare. We make light of the vice and crime, but it was pretty rank. For instance, the age of consent was ten and not a few Klondikers disappeared and never showed up again. It’s really safer to talk about toilets, rats, and political corruption in pursuit of the almighty dollar.”

No doubt, but sewage wasn’t my topic of interest. “We’re specifically looking for anything about Indian activity in the underground, any legends about monsters or ghosts that were banished from the area and when those might have occurred.”

Rick shook his head. “Aside from the story I told you about the shaman, I don’t know much about that. The local Indians haven’t had much pull with the city historically, so if they wanted to do anything or thought there was something going on, they were pretty much ignored until the eighties or later. Even the totems in Occidental Park were a pretty late sop to the native population.”

“Was there any activity after the earthquake of 1949?” I asked.

Rick thought a moment, narrowing his eyes so the wandering one seemed to vanish.

“Hmm… I think there might have been some kind of ceremony by the local Indians then, but I’m not sure. There was a lot in the papers of the time about the buildings that had been damaged and the repair or destruction of them, but the local natives didn’t rate that kind of coverage. Some interesting artifacts were found in the mess, since it was the first time some of that ground had been excavated since the fire. I think they pulled up some of the original wooden sewer pipes then and found a lot of objects in the street fill, since the city dumped anything it could get into the streets to raise them—including dead animals and broken furniture. Most of it was just thrown into a different dump, afterward. People weren’t very interested in the historical value of things dug out of the street then, and the local tribes hadn’t yet convinced the state to treat Indian artifacts as important. If the Indians did some kind of ceremony to placate earth spirits or ancestors, you’d get a lot more information by talking to them.”

I wasn’t sure there was anyone else left to ask. I said as much to Quinton as we climbed the stairs from the tour shop to the Square.

“Not a total bust, though,” he said. “We know the Indians were aware of things going on down there; we just don’t know what they did about it.”

“We’ll have to hope we get some information from Fish on that. And I’m going to have to go to the Danzigers’ and talk to them about something.”

“You think they’ll have some ideas about this?”

“No. I saw something down there that might link up to something else, but I’m not sure. I want to check before I make an assumption.”

Quinton stopped as we got outside the door and looked around. We both spotted Zip and Lass nearby. Lass chattered and punctuated his words with hard slashes at the air while Zip smoked. Across the street, I saw Sandy dragging her cart and watching something ahead of her that I couldn’t pick out. Lass and Zip suddenly turned and started in the direction of the Bread of Life Mission—it was dinnertime—passing Sandy, who ignored them.

Quinton rustled beside me as he pulled his hat down a little farther on his head. The night was coming down with a sharp edge of ice, and we watched the homeless as they drifted toward food and shelter and respite from the short, harsh day.

“All right,” he said. “I’ll do some more asking around. I’ll call if anything comes up.”

“Hey,” I said, putting my hand self-consciously on his sleeve. “Umm… This was kind of fun. Aside from the working part.”

“And the creepy parts. What happened down by the bank? It got damned cold down there and you were talking to something.”

“And that’s about all. There was some kind of remnant of whatever the medicine man did at that corner—a real ugly customer. It told me a riddle about where the Sistu was, but it doesn’t make any sense.”

Quinton took one of my hands in both of his and chafed it warm. “What did it say?”

“It said I’d find death where there was no comfort, between the tides, in a pool that is not a pool. Whatever that means.”

“Why would it be all cryptic like that?”

“Because it can. Ghosts want to talk to me, but that doesn’t mean they want to say anything nice. The nastier the spirit, the more likely it is to want something equally nasty or just to want to do someone some hurt. Most ghosts don’t know we’re here. Of the ones who do, some are angry enough to want to do us harm. They’re pissed off because they’re dead and we’re not.”

Quinton nodded, making a thoughtful grunt and rubbing my other hand. “I get that. I might be pretty ticked off myself if I were a ghost.”

“You’d certainly not be able to do that,” I said, nodding at his hands around mine.

He blushed and let go. “No, and that would be a pity. God, it’s cold out here,” he added, looking around again, uncertain of himself for a moment. “I’ll give that riddle some thought and I’ll try to find some other information for you.”

“Thanks,” I replied. I admit I was thinking about his stealth kiss the previous night and wondering if he’d try it again.

Instead he blushed a bit more—thinking the same thing? — nodded, and walked off after Zip, Lass, and Sandy. I went back to the Rover, a little disappointed, and headed toward Queen Anne.