Underground

CHAPTER 4

One of the requirements for my degree in criminal science was a psychology course about criminals and victims of crime. For a week we discussed how victims cope with the results of the crimes—everything from burglary and bank fraud to rape and the murder of loved ones—committed against them. In the end, all traumas elicit one of two major categories of response: break or cope. Breaking down is good for you, I’m told—catharsis and all that jazz—but I rarely indulge in it and never for long. Me, I’m of the suck-it-up school of coping till you crack. So after a night of feeling like a dog that’d been kicked, I dragged myself out of bed, worked out, and went back to my job. But Will was in the back of my mind and I worried in silence while I made myself work.

In between witness checks for Nan Grover, I left a message for Quinton and eventually arranged to meet up with him back in Pioneer Square about three o’clock. Quinton was standing near the bust of Chief Sealth and talking to Zip when I spotted him.

“…Thoreau was protesting the Mexican-American War,” he was saying as I approached.

Zip lipped an unlit cigarette and spoke in an impaired mumble that twitched out of one corner of his mouth. I’d gotten used to his odd speech in the months we’d been acquainted. “So he din’t pay his taxes?” Zip asked.

Quinton nodded. “Yup. And they threw him in jail.”

Under his flap-eared cap Zip looked thoughtful, rubbing his white-bristled chin with one hand that was clenched around his prized lighter. “Huh. So, this in’t new? Tellin’ the gov’ment you in’t gonna pay fer a war?”

“Nope. See, man, you were the practitioner of an honorable tradition.”

“Hm,” Zip grunted, lighting his smoke and stamping his feet to stay warm. “Wish they hadn’t thrown me in the nuthouse, though.”

“Setting yourself on fire may have been a bit much, Zip.”

“I come out OK.” He looked up and noticed me. “Hey’m, Harper.”

I had to shake myself out of my distracted funk. “Hey, Zip. Do you mind if I take Quinton for a while?”

He flipped his hand lazily at us. “Nah. Gonna get dinner in a minute. God Squads got chowder on Friday. S’Friday, right?”

“Has been all day,” Quinton replied.

“Good. ‘Cause y’know, they change that on ya sometimes. Sometimes it’s Wednesday halfway through, then it’s Vienna sausages. Don’ like them. They’s like fingers. I in’t gonna eat no fingers.”

“Not even fish fingers?”

Zip pushed out his lips and frowned, the smoldering cigarette wobbling on his lip like a wind sock in a changeable breeze. “Fish in’t got fingers.” Then he huffed, hunched into his filthy layers of clothing, and marched off.

“Think he’s offended?” I asked.

“With Zip you never know. So. You wanted to talk…?”

“Yeah. About that incident yesterday. But this isn’t the best place.” I forced my wandering mind into the work at hand and looked around, letting my gaze sweep past the pair of heavily jacketed beat cops chatting up the bums on the benches in front of Doc Maynard’s Public House. It wasn’t tourist season and their demeanor was more solicitous than threatening, but with Quinton’s dislike of cops, I assumed he wouldn’t want to talk about dead men out on the street where they might hear.

“Yeah,” he replied. He bit his lip and frowned a moment before continuing. “Come on. I know where we can talk and you can get a better idea of what’s happening.”

He led the way west toward the water. I shuddered at the memory of the previous evening, but after we’d crossed First, we walked only one more block before Quinton turned right onto Post. It’s not officially designated Post Alley at the south end, but its not much wider than if it were. It was already dark in the narrow street between the old masonry buildings, and the picturesque red brick underfoot was crusted with dirty ice. I dug my boot soles into the uneven and ghost-strewn surface with firm steps, following Quinton through the turns of the road until we reached a poured concrete wall under the Seneca Street off-ramp from the viaduct. A three-story retaining wall held back the tumble of the hill while a wide stone staircase climbed the side of the building perpendicular to it, creating a dark half room roofed by the roadbed above us. The other side of the street held the southern loading docks and dog-walking slab for the hotel tower of the Harbor Steps complex—an area I had discovered had no active history in the pit that had been gouged into the cliff edge for its foundations.

Just behind us, the rich, tilting timescape of the Grey looked like the Painted Desert done in shades of mist. Our location lay at the intersection of history and void, and I couldn’t help but stare at the contrast.

Quinton touched my shoulder and startled me out of my rapt gaping. He motioned me into the darkest corner, where the retaining wall met the back of the staircase. A shallow, bunkerlike structure of concrete slabs poked out from the retaining wall. A rusted steel door had been set into the bunker wall and sported a triangular yellow caution sign with an odd symbol of spikes and circles and the words authorized personnel only.

Quinton pulled a short cylinder—about the size of a fat pocket flashlight—from his coat and pushed it against a plate above the door’s lock. I heard something clunk and he grabbed the door handle that looked as if it shouldn’t turn, but did. The door swung in, and he stepped through into darkness and pulled me in behind him.

The door closed with the thick thud and hush of heavy rubber seals. The lock clunked again and the lights came on. We were in a small cement vestibule that opened into a larger area bounded by old walls of stone and brick. The room was cluttered with shelves and tables made of plain boards and various containers or architectural elements that must have been discarded in someone’s rebuilding scheme long ago. Electronic equipment was neatly arranged among stacks of parts, books, clothes, and canned goods. A dorm fridge hummed under one of the tables.

It was like some mad scientist’s basement that had been taken over by engineering students.

A crazy collection of lights hung from wires strung between the walls to illuminate the roughly L-shaped room. The walls rose to a height of about thirty feet, and we were standing right in the corner of the L with the door behind us in the short side. A bed hid in an alcove at the long end of the L. The final wall beside the bed was built of heavy timbers held together with archaic metal straps and huge bolts—not medieval so much as Victorian gothic. It reminded me a bit of a castles massive gates that had smaller doors cut into them.

I stared around the place. “We’re under the sidewalk,” I said in wonder. “Or part of it…”

“Yeah, that wall supports the stairs,” Quinton agreed, pointing toward the bed alcove. “The wooden part blocks off the old sidewalk level.”

“You live here?”

“For about six years. The company that built the Harbor Steps put in the bunker as a temporary security box during the excavation and I… appropriated it when they were done, before anyone thought to remove it. I made sure the paperwork disappeared, and once the sign and locks were on the door, everyone seems to have figured it was someone else’s problem. Especially since no one’s keys work on the lock.” He shrugged. “Must not be the authorized personnel.”

“Where’s the electricity come from?”

He waved at the concrete wall. One end was covered in electrical panels. “It comes straight off the utility grid. Just looks like more of the city works to the system. I thought about pulling cable, but it’s been hard to get at without attracting attention. I use the library’s system or the Wi-Fi that’s all over the place in Seattle now. No water, though. I’m not too handy with plumbing.”

I ignored the trivia. “How…?”

“People don’t pay much attention to things that look like they belong. I keep things repaired and smoothed over so no one has any reason to come and look for problems or wonder what’s in here. Just a utility hole for something no one’s curious about.”

“So the symbol on the door…?”

“Means nothing—I made it up—but it looks like something you ought to be afraid of, doesn’t it?”

“Yes,” I agreed, and I wondered if there were other things to be afraid of here.

The diabolical cleverness of the bunker was unnerving. The situation with Will had left me raw, and the oddity of Quinton’s actions the previous day had me on high alert for trouble. “Why go to all this effort, though? What are you hiding from?” I asked. I was a little afraid to hear the answer.

“Kind of a long story, but, basically, I just want my own life entirely in my own control. Or as much as I can get it.” That was a sentiment with which I could concur. Not knowing my thoughts, he continued, “The only way I can see to have that is to be out of the system. So I got out of it. I don’t have a social security card or a driver’s license or a voter registration. I have no fixed address, no job, no ties, no bank account.”

He hung up his coat and hat and turned on an electric space heater that was sitting near one of the tables.

“Sounds kind of isolated.”

He shrugged and pulled the elastic band off his ponytail, scrubbing his hair loose onto his shoulders with a growl of pleasure before heading for the tiny fridge. “In some ways, yeah, it is, but its not so lonely. There’s a lot of people down here who are like me in one way or another.”

“Down where?” I asked, leaning against the nearest wall with my arms crossed, still a bit unsure of the situation.

“Here. The literal underground, Pioneer Square—the skids. The homeless, the discarded, the hidden… we’re all down here. We’re our own community. And that’s why I’m a little pissed about the deaths and disappearances. These guys are my friends—my neighbors. Sometimes I’m the only one around who isn’t off his rocker, and I feel like I ought to do something when we’re threatened.”

“And of course getting me involved means that you don’t have to expose yourself in order to do the right thing.”

He opened the fridge and looked into it. “That sounds kind of selfish of me. And cynical of you. You want a beer?”

“Well, if you’re going to call me cynical, what kind of beer?”

He laughed. “I don’t know. I have one or two bottles of about five different things in here—people keep paying me for stuff in beer. Or books.”

A sudden muffled rapping came from the wooden wall by the bed. Quinton kicked the refrigerator closed and trotted past me to the sleeping alcove. He pushed on something and looked at the small screen that was revealed behind it. Then he covered it up again and grabbed one edge of the wall. He pulled and it swung open. It was, as I’d imagined, a door within a larger gate that only looked like a wall. Now I knew how he’d moved in the bed, since the bunker door wasn’t very large.

In the doorway stood a hunched, dark form. It leaned into the light and looked up at Quinton—he’s a little shorter than I am, so the figure was hunkered down pretty small. It was a dark-skinned man, but I couldn’t tell if that was natural or just dirt. He held out a metal box—some kind of electrical equipment to judge by the colored wires hanging off it. He was shaking and looking behind himself, wrapped in a twitchy haze of substance withdrawal.

“Hey, Q-man. I brought you the radio. See, I said I would. It’s OK, right?”

Quinton took the radio and looked it over. “Yeah, this’ll be good. Hang on.” He went to one of the tables, put down the radio, and picked up a palm-sized object made of black PVC pipe with a couple of metal horns sticking off one end. He carried it back to the door and started to hand it to the man. Then he hesitated.

“You know how to use this?”

“Yeah, yeah!” the guy said, reaching out for the thing.

Quinton looked askance at him and kept the black tube just out of reach. “Sure, Lass. Let me show you, just in case. You hold the plain end and you push the button on the side, see.” A blue-white ribbon of electricity jumped between the horns with a crack. “Make sure that bits touching the bad guy when you push the button, OK?”

The hunched man nodded vigorously and accepted the shock gun. “Yeah, yeah. OK. Got it.”

“No shocking Tanker’s dog, all right?”

“He scares me! I don’t like… animals,” he added, shooting another glance behind himself.

“Avoid him. If you take out that dog, Tank’ll take you out—zap gun or no zap gun. Got it?”

Lass hung his head. “Yeah, yeah… No shocking the dog. I got other ways around that dog… All right. Just the creepy guys. And monsters.”

“Monsters? What monsters?” Quinton asked, intense.

The smaller man looked startled and backed up a step. “You know. The things that come out of the walls, up out of the holes, the sewer…” Lass’s voice got shrill and he started to shake harder.

“Ah. Those. Yeah. That’s all right. You go ahead and shock the hell out those,”

Quinton said, patting the man on the shoulder. “You’ll be all right.”

The other man nodded and tucked the little device into his pocket. “Yeah. OK. Thanks, Q-man.” He scampered off into what looked like a brick corridor beyond the door.

Quinton closed the wooden portal and turned back to me. “Want that beer now?”

“Sure,” I said, relaxing into a chair I pulled out from under one of the tables.

I was reassured by the little scene that Quinton wasn’t a dangerous lunatic who had lured me to his lair to kill me or something. Lass would have been an easier mark and less likely to cause complications.

Quinton gave me a New Belgium Brewing Company bottle that had lost its label.

“Mystery beer—figured it was a better risk than the Rolling Rock.”

I made a face while Quinton uncapped the brown bottle for me. The contents proved to be Sunshine Wheat. That was fine.

“Does that sort of visit happen often?” I asked.

Quinton quirked his mouth up on one side and frowned a little. “Not quite like that. People do ask me to fix things or solve problems, but Lass’s been really freaked out lately and wanted something to drive the spooks off—he’s been trying to quit drinking again, and he gets jittery and crazy.”

“So, he’s got DTs—hallucinating and that sort of thing.”

“Maybe. He’s sure there’s someone after him, but around here there may well be. Vampires turn up around here sometimes, hunting.”

“You know, Quinton, you’re pretty calm about the vampire thing. Most people don’t believe they exist. Most people don’t believe in anything magic or occult. People like Will—”

I caught myself before I went too far, but Quinton peered at me. “Will.” He shook his head. “I imagine it’s… hard for you… dating someone who isn’t comfortable with those ideas.”

I looked away, annoyed with myself for feeling a flush of misery and anger I didn’t want him to see. “Yeah… well… I don’t think we’re dating anymore.”

I held up a hand and, shaking my head, I added, “Right now, I don’t want to talk about Will and all those other people who believe in pop science and TV and what the newspapers tell them—stuff that fits in their transparent little scientific world. I thought you didn’t particularly care for vampires and ghosts and witches and magic, but you don’t seem to have any problem with the idea—the reality—of them. Or with me. Why is that?”

He took a moment before he answered. “I don’t believe in holding on to notions that don’t work, just because a majority of people prefer them. I learned that slipping into the cracks meant I had to learn to see the cracks first.” He leaned one hip against a worktable supporting the carcass of a gas-powered leaf blower and sipped his beer. “Sometimes I’ve had to figure out that something exists by inference or inductive reasoning when—like gravity—it’s not something you can see or touch. I went looking for the holes in what most people accept as reality, and where I couldn’t find a solid answer just sitting there, I poked around until other things led to a conclusion that fit, even if it seemed screwy. The knowledge of those holes and cracks has helped me out many times.

“So I’m used to acknowledging things that most people don’t even believe in. I can’t see magic—like I think you do—but I can see evidence that there’s an unexplained force in the world. Down here where anarchy is the status quo, the presence of magic and the things that go with it are a lot more obvious, if you’re alert. Or unlucky.”

“Have you ever seen a ghost?” I asked. It would be nice to know that someone else did…

“Ghost? No. I don’t think so. Weird stuff, cold stuff, sourceless movements of air or steam, auditory anomalies—yeah, plenty. Is that what a ghost is?”

“No. That’s just the special effects,” I replied in a dry voice.

“Magic and ghosts are two things I have to concede, but I still don’t like them. I don’t like vampires either, but that’s a different thing. When you’re one of the hidden people, you’re fair game for them—no one’s going to notice you’re gone.” The air around him seemed to curdle with his disgust, his emotional radiation going olive green shot with angry bolts of red. “The homeless are just as disposable to them as they are to the rest of society, but the vampires can get something from them before they toss them on the dung heap. I think they’re responsible for whatever is happening to the homeless people and undergrounders.”

“The vampires? Why?”

“Why not? Who else would be down here, preying on people? We’re like the fast food of the vampire world. Just drop down to Pioneer Square after dark, find an alley or a doorway, slip down into a basement, and there’s lunch. I just can’t figure out why their approach has changed. They’re usually careful and they don’t rip into people the way most of these bodies have been. They don’t chew, for one thing.”

“Why haven’t you asked Edward? You obviously have some clout with the… undergrounders.” The term felt odd in my mouth. “You know Edward and he knows you. Couldn’t you go to him as a neutral party, a representative of the homeless?”

Not that I thought the city’s chief vampire was likely to welcome Quinton with open arms—they didn’t seem to like each other—but I’d thought there was some mutual respect there, at least enough to make a parlay possible.

Quinton snorted and coughed on his beer. “Hell, no! I’ve gotten between the vampires and their next meal often enough to be unpopular with Edward and his friends.” If he hadn’t been drinking good beer, I think Quinton would have spit.

“And none of them’s tried to whack you yet?”

“They’ve tried. But I know what their weaknesses are and how to hurt them without killing them outright—which would make me fair game. I have tried to stay neutral—it’s a bad idea to have enemies down here. I used to do bits of work for Edward when I first got here, but working for him’s like working for the government, and I’ve had to keep my distance—and force him to keep his. I’m in no position to go snooping around at the After Dark.”

I shouldn’t have been surprised that Quinton knew about the vampire club—he seemed to know about a lot of things I was still figuring out. I sighed. “So, you want me to go to Edward?”

“Only if it’s necessary. I think it’s his crew, but I could be wrong. I don’t have the skills to really know what’s going on. That’s what I want—to know what’s going on and stop it. I don’t want to be lunch and I don’t want any more of my neighbors to be lunch, and I sure as hell don’t want anyone snooping around down here and bringing this place to official notice. Things are getting pretty high-profile now that the cops are looking into the guy I found in the tunnel, and it won’t be long before other… people start to stir the waters. That’s not good for any of us.”

“All right,” I said, putting down my empty bottle. “I get you. How many dead or missing are there?”

“Three dead, five missing. And the leg in the pit—which might be unconnected, but I doubt it.”

“Some of the missing could have moved on to some other location,” I suggested.

“One or two, but most of these guys have no way out of here. It’s not like they have cars or money for fares. In this cold at this time of year, most couldn’t walk far enough in a day to make it to the next place they could be assured of food and shelter. And it’s not like you can continuously hop transit buses from here to Los Angeles or someplace. Most of these people are stuck here—they didn’t come here by choice like I did—so they’re already at the end of the line. If they go missing from this community, the chances are good they’re dead.”

I narrowed my eyes at him and played devil’s advocate. “Some of them do get out. They find homes and jobs.”

“Some do—there are some good service groups around Seattle helping the ones who want help—but they usually let the rest of us know. That’s not what’s happening here. It’s the ones who stand the least chance of that who’ve been disappearing or turning up dead: the odd men out. They haven’t been killing themselves, so someone or something has been doing it for them.”

I put up my hands, conceding. “All right. Someone’s killing homeless people, and if the guy in the tunnel is typical, it’s in a pretty bizarre way. All right, you’ve convinced me. But I’m still not ready to agree it’s vampires. I don’t really want to mess with Edward unless there’s a good reason.”

“Then let’s go find one. Or find something else.”

Quinton stepped away from the table he’d been leaning on and collected his coat and hat before he started for the wooden door by the bed. I shrugged and got up to follow him.

Beyond the wooden wall was a tall, narrow corridor of brick and stone on one side and heavy stone blocks on the other. The surface beneath our feet was rough cement. There were no lights except what Quinton made with a pocket flashlight.

“There aren’t that many places where you can get in without anyone knowing,” he said as he led me down the cold hall. “Most of the actual underground is closed up pretty tight if it’s not in use by the property owner. I sort of forced my way in.”

“How did Lass get in, then?” “Oh, there’s a way down here where some service stairs go into the basement of the building at the other end of the block. He doesn’t know about the other door. Most people don’t.”

I stopped and stared at the wall on the right dimly illuminated by the light from Quinton’s flashlight, and I recognized the bricked-in shapes of windows and doors set above crumbled steps. “Where are we? What’s this building?”

“I don’t know the building’s name, but if you walked through the wall, you’d be in the kitchen of Las Margaritas Mexican restaurant. Next to that is the workroom and storage space for a wedding dress boutique. From here to the hotel is the back rooms of the stores that face Post. We’re under the sidewalk of First Avenue.”

“How far does this go?” I asked.

“Only to the end of the block. Then you have to get back out on the street. We’ll come out under McCormick and Schmick’s side door. There’s a lot more of these buried sidewalks, though. In some places, you can get into the basements of buildings, if you know what you’re doing. It’s supposed to be completely closed up, but nothing’s ever totally sealed. In weather like this, people who can’t get into the official shelters will look for any shelter they can get, even if it’s a hole in a wall, and some of those holes lead into the underground.”

I knew that there was an “underground city” below parts of Seattle—mostly Pioneer Square—but I hadn’t put any thought into what it actually was or how it would be laid out. I wasn’t sure of the details, but I did know the underground was a remnant of the city’s rebuilding after the famous fire. The streets had been raised from the muck and fireproof stone and brick architecture mandated in place of the previous tide-flat-level roads and wooden buildings.

They’d even laid a modern sewer and water supply that didn’t backflush every time the tide came in. This buried corridor, formed of the building’s foot and the raised road’s retaining wall under the modern sidewalk, was just a part of that whole tangled, buried mess.

I’d thought the underground city was just a tourist version of local history in basements and sewers. Listening to Quinton, it seemed that there were really two undergrounds—the physical one and the hidden social structure of the economically dispossessed who lived near or in it. I couldn’t help but wonder if there was more to it…

I put my hand against the building’s wall and relaxed, breathing in the musty smell of the space below the street. Quinton just stood by without speaking as I let the Grey come up to full strength around me.

Most of the time, the Grey seems darker than the normal world, but this time, the silvery overlay of time and memory was brighter—much brighter. The accessible layers of time at that spot all seemed to be filled with daylight.

Ghosts bustled past, busy with their own long-ago affairs: women in sweeping dresses from the 1890s, men in suits or work clothes. A mob of giggling flappers stumbled through me, shushing each other in drunken whispers and going on their way just as giddily as before. I shivered involuntarily when they touched me. I looked around, expecting to see an open sky over the street on the other side of the walkway, but there was still a wall, even then. I glanced up and realized that the light poured down into the sidewalk through thick glass prisms in the concrete above. In other angles of time there was no upper walkway, just ramps that connected the upstairs shop doors to the street across the open hole and a wooden staircase at the corner.

It was like some underground mall that had collected an undue measure of history. I gave a small gasp of surprise as I realized that this now-abandoned place had been the thriving heart of the city’s shopping and business district at one time, full of people at all hours where now there were only shadows and dust.

“Do you see something?” Quinton asked. I shifted my focus back to him and saw he was a little nervous at his question. I considered lying—it was what I usually had to do—but if ever there was a time to risk disclosure, this seemed like the best chance I would ever have.

“Ghosts,” I replied. “Lots of the city’s memory of itself.”

He was curious. “The city’s memory? That’s a funny way to put it.”

“Its the best I can come up with. The things I’m seeing here aren’t aware of us. They’re just like recordings. But there’s a lot of them. Layers and layers. This must have been a popular corner.”

“I don’t think so. This end of the city was built up later than the parts around Pioneer Square, though I think the fire started near here…” Hm.

I just looked at it a while longer, letting it flood in: the flickering images of the original buildings overlaid with the roar and rush of fire consuming the wooden city and the stop-motion play of the landscape as it became a towering canyon of brick and stone where dead generations shopped, visited, and caroused in helical time. This was not the low-down history I’d seen replayed on Occidental, but something more middle class that had risen with the streets, eventually, rather than being buried and disinterred only for tourist show-and-tell.

“Do you want to continue?”

I could feel my toes going numb from the cold seeping into my boots and I pulled myself out of the hypnotic depth of history. “Yes. These ghosts aren’t going anywhere and there’s probably a lot more of them around. Let’s go.”

We went down the dank corridor and around a corner to a low door. Quinton tinkered with it a bit and opened it with care, looking around before he stepped out to let me through. We stepped out and headed uphill to First. The weather had driven people indoors, and none were looking out of McCormick and Schmick’s windows to see us emerge. We crossed between the old and new federal buildings and continued back toward Pioneer Square.