sewer.
Deeper in, he couldn’t help but notice fine, powdery dust still coating the walls of the original tunnel. This was a hallowed place, still very much a graveyard. Where bodies and buildings were pulverized, reduced to atoms.
He saw burrows, he saw tracks and scat, but no rats. He picked away at the burrows with his rod, and listened. He heard nothing.
The strung-up work lights ended at a turn, a deep, velvety blackness lying ahead. Vasiliy carried a million- candlepower spot lamp in his bag—a big yellow Garrity with a bullhorn grip—as well as two backup mini Maglites. But artificial light in a dark enclosure wiped out one’s night vision altogether, and for rat hunting he liked to stay dark and quiet. He pulled out a night-vision monocular instead, a handheld unit with a strap that attached nicely to his hard hat, coming down over his left eye. Closing his right eye turned the tunnel green. Rat vision, he called it, their beady eyes glowing in the scope.
Nothing. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, the rats were gone. Driven off.
That stumped him. It took a lot to displace rats. Even once you removed their food source, it could be weeks before seeing a change. Not days.
The tunnel was joined by older passages, Vasiliy coming across filth-covered rail tracks unused for many years. The quality of the ground soil had changed, and he could tell by its very texture that he had crossed over from “new” Manhattan—the landfill that had been brought in to build up Battery Park out of sludge—into “old” Manhattan, the original dry island bedrock.
He stopped at a junction to make certain he had his bearings. As he looked down the length of the crossing tunnel, he saw, in his rat vision, a pair of eyes. They glowed back at him like rat eyes, but bigger, and high off the ground.
The eyes were gone in a flash, turning out of sight.
“Hey?” yelled Vasiliy, his call echoing. “Hey up there!”
After a moment, a voice answered him, echoing back off the walls. “Who goes there?”
Vasiliy detected a note of fear in the voice. A flashlight appeared, its source down at the end of the tunnel, well beyond where Vasiliy had seen the eyes. He flipped up the monocular just in time, saving his retina. He identified himself, pulling out a little Maglite to shine back as a signal, then moved forward. At the point where he estimated seeing the eyes, the old access tunnel ran up alongside another tunnel track that appeared to be in use. The monocular showed him nothing, no glowing eyes, so he continued around the bend to the next junction.
He found three sandhogs there, in goggles and sticker-covered hard hats, wearing flannels, jeans, and boots. A sump pump was running, channeling out a leak. The halogen bulbs of their high-powered work-light tripods lit up the new tunnel like a space-creature movie. They stood close together, tense until they could fully see Vasiliy.
“Did I just see one of you back there?” he asked.
The three guys looked at one another. “What’d you see?”
“Thought I saw someone.” He pointed. “Cutting across the track.”
The three sandhogs looked at one another again, then two of them started packing up. The third one said, “You the guy looking for rats?”
“Yeah.”
The groundhog shook his head. “No more rats here.”
“I don’t mean to contradict you, but that’s almost impossible. How come?”
“Could be they’ve got more sense than us.”
Vasiliy looked down the lit tunnel, in the direction of the sump hose. “The subway exit down there?”
“That’s the way out.”
Vasiliy pointed in the opposite direction. “What’s this way?”
The sandhog said, “You don’t want to go that way.”
“Why not?”
“Look. Forget about rats. Follow us out. We’re done here.”
Water was still trickling into the troughlike puddle. Vasiliy said, “I’ll be right along.”
The guy dead-eyed him. “Suit yourself,” he said, switching off a tripod lamp and then hoisting a pack onto his back, starting after the others.
Vasiliy watched them go, lights playing far down the tunnel, darkening along a gradual turn. He heard the screeching of subway car wheels, near enough to concern him. He went on, crossing to the newer track, waiting for his eyes to acclimate themselves to the darkness again.
He switched on his monocular, everything going subterranean green. The echoing of his footfalls changed as the tunnel broadened to a trash-strewn exchange near a convergence of tracks. Rivet-studded steel beams stood at regular intervals, like pillars in an industrial ballroom. An abandoned maintenance shack stood to Vasiliy’s right, defaced by vandalism. The shack’s crumbling brick walls featuring some artless graffiti tags around a depiction of the twin towers in flames. One was labeled “Saddam,” the other “Gamera.”
On an old support, an ancient track sign had once warned workers:
It had since been defaced, the
Indeed, this godforsaken place should have been rat central. He decided to go to black light. He pulled the small wand from his Puma bag and switched it on, the bulb burning cool blue in the dark. Rodent urine fluoresces under black light, due to its bacterial content. He ran it over the ground near the supports, a moonlike landscape of dry trash and filth. He noticed some duller, older, piddling stains but nothing fresh. Not until he waved it near a rusted oil barrel lying on its side. The barrel and the floor beneath it lit up bigger and brighter than any rat piss he had ever seen. A huge splash. Factored out from what he normally found, this trace would indicate a six-foot rat.
It was the recent bodily waste of some larger animal, possibly a man.
The
He couldn’t tell how near. Given his one-eyed view scope and the geometrical pattern of the identical beams, his depth perception was shot.
He did not call out a hello this time. He did not say anything but gripped his rebar a bit more tightly. The homeless, when you encountered them, were rarely combative—but this felt like something different. Put it down to an exterminator’s sixth sense. The way he could sniff out rat infestations. Vasiliy suddenly felt outnumbered.
He pulled out his bright bullhorn spot lamp and scanned the chamber. Before retreating, he reached back into his bag, broke open the cardboard spout on a box of tracking powder, and shook out a fair amount of rodenticide over the area. Tracking powder worked more slowly than pure edible bait, but also more surely. It had the added advantage of showing the intruders’ tracks, making follow-up nest baiting easier.
Vasiliy hastily emptied three cartons, then turned with his lamp and made his way back through the tunnels. He came across active tracks with the boxed-over third rail, and then the sump pump, and followed the long hose. At one point he felt the tunnel wind change, and turned to see the curve brightening behind him. He quickly stepped back into a wall recess, bracing himself, the roar deafening. The train squealed past and Vasiliy glimpsed commuters in the windows before shielding his eyes from the smoky swirl of grit and dust.
It passed, and he followed the tracks until he reached a lighted platform. He surfaced with bag and rod, pulling himself up off the track onto the mostly empty platform, next to a sign that read, IF YOU SEE SOMETHING, SAY SOMETHING. Nobody did. He walked up the mezzanine stairs and moved through the turnstiles, resurfacing on the street into the warming sun. He moved to a nearby fence and found himself back above the World Trade Center construction site. He lit a cheroot with his blue flame butane Zippo and sucked in the poison, chasing the fear he’d felt under the streets. He walked back across the street to the World Trade Center site, coming upon two
