Underground

Author’s Note

In this book I’ve played faster and looser than I usually do with Seattle’s real-life geography. In fact, the underground is mostly condemned, inaccessible by anyone but utility workers, or in use by the tenants of the various buildings that rise over it. If you aren’t on the Underground Tour or don’t have legitimate access to a building’s cellar, you won’t get into it without breaking a law or perpetrating a miracle. But the idea of the underground—with monsters—was so intriguing that I threw a lot to the wind and plunged into it anyway.

I did try to keep as much of the reality intact as possible, however, and I got a lot of help with the history and the layout of the area from Rick Boetel, the chief historian of Bill Speidels Underground Tour. I’ve presented the history and fact of the underground as truthfully as I could: toilets really did flush backward at high tide before the streets were raised; people really did fall to their deaths from the streets to the sidewalks; a shaman really did exorcise the ghosts of native spirits from the underground corner at Yesler and First; and prostitution and other crimes and vices really did thrive in the darkness below the city streets right into the 1970s. There really was a Roy Olmstead (though I hope not an Albert Frye), who really was both a policeman and a bootlegger. And, yes, there really was a dumping ground near where Occidental crosses Royal Brougham.

Rick’s help was invaluable, but I was also able to get additional information from books and Web sites. Surprisingly, one of the most useful books was Distant Corner by Jeffrey Karl Ochsner and Dennis Alan Anderson, an architectural treatise from the University of Washington Press on the influence of architect H. H. Richardson (no relation) on the rebuilding of Seattle after the Great Fire. This book details the buildings; who built them; where and when; what they were made of; as well as their original purposes and what had previously been on the site. It contains a lot of photos, drawings, and maps, and it often discusses what became of the buildings in later years. This book provided the information on the buildings that collapsed during construction and some information about others that were damaged in the 1949 earthquake. It was also a surprisingly fun read.

With some idea of the history and geography of the underground in mind, I then needed a monster. It’s harder than you might imagine to find a really good maneating monster that isn’t already working its fangs off in a half-dozen other series or films or TV shows. After several false starts, I settled on the Pacific Northwest Native American legend of the Sisiutl. And promptly got teased by both my agent and my editor. No one, they said, could take seriously a monster with such a goofy-sounding moniker. Being a stubborn cuss, I swore I’d make it work. I hope I did, but if nothing else, I got a great argument out of it that made it into the book as the discussion between Harper, Quinton, and Fish as they drive away from the Tulalip reservation. That’s not quite how it happened in real life, but it makes much better reading.

As with many legends, Sisiutl’s tales are occasionally contradictory and change with the telling or the teller. I ended up picking and choosing in order to make the monster suit my story, but I hope I was true to the spirit of the creature.

The mythology and legends of the Pacific Northwest Salish are rich and weird, and I owe a lot to the Seattle Public Library’s collection, which includes a reprint of Mythology of Southern Puget Sound: Legends Shared by Tribal Elders, which was collected and translated from the Lushootseed principally by Seattle historian Arthur Ballard. It’s a great book, and it offers a wonderful peek into the culture of the local tribes at the time. I was also able to find audio recordings of spoken Lushootseed online at the Seattle Times Web site (seattletimes.nwsource.com/news/local/seattle_history/about_ audio).

As I was writing the story, Seattle experienced one of its coldest winters on record—with overnight temperatures in the single digits. The drama of the unusual weather was an irresistible addition to the book. Yes, it was that cold.

Of course, I consulted a lot of other sources for my background research, and I hope I utilized the information well—or at least haven’t enraged the authors by clumsy handling. I’ve made every effort to neither plagiarize nor distort, and to present as realistic a picture as possible of my rather fantastical Seattle, but this is still a work of fiction and isn’t intended as anything else. Where I’ve twisted history, fact, or geography, I’ve done it for artistic reasons, meaning no malice or insult, nor any attempt to present my story as fact. Where there are errors, they are entirely my fault.