Awful place, he vowed never to … But they are waiting. “Okay,” he says finally, plunging into the bushes like a diver into a pool full of sharks. “Okay.”
With the others walking up his heels, Weston looks down into the hole. It’s dark as death. Relieved, he looks up. “Sorry, we can’t do it today. Not without flashlights. Now—”
“Got it covered.” The veteran produces a bundle—halogen miner’s lamps on headbands. Handing them out, he says the obvious, “Always…”
Weston groans. “Prepared.”
He stands by as his tourists drop into the tunnel, one by one. If they don’t come out, what will he tell their families? Will they sue? Will he go to jail? He’s happy to stand at the brink mulling it, but the marine shoves him into the hole. “Your turn.”
He drops in after Weston, shutting out daylight with his bulk. The only way they can go is down.
All his life since his parents died, Lawrence Weston has taken great pains to control his environment. Now he is in a place he never imagined. Life goes on, but everything flies out of control. He is part of
Weston doesn’t know what he expects: rats, lurking dragons, thugs with billy clubs, a tribe of pale, blind mutants, or a bunch of gaudy neohippies in sordid underground squats. In fact, several passages fan out from the main entrance, rough tunnels leading to larger caverns with entrances and exits of their own; the underground kingdom is bigger than he feared. He had no idea it would be so old. Debris brought down from the surface to shore up the burrow sticks out of the mud and stone like a schoolchild’s display of artifacts from every era. The mud plastering the walls is studded with hardware from the streetcar/gaslight 1890s, fragments of glass and plastic from the Day-Glo skateboard 1990s, and motherboards, abandoned CRTs, bumpers from cars that are too new to carbon date. The walls are buttressed by four-by-fours, lit by LED bulbs strung from wires, but Weston moves along in a crouch, as though the earth is just about to collapse on his head—which might be merciful, given the fumes. Although fresh air is coming in from somewhere, there is the intolerable stink of mud and small dead things, and although to his surprise this tunnel, at least, is free of the expected stink of piss and excrement, there is the smell that comes of too many people living too close together, an overpoweringly human fug.
At first Weston sees nobody, hears nothing he can make sense of, knows only that he can’t be in this awful place.
Dense air weighs on him so he can hardly breathe—the effluvia of human souls. Then a voice rises in the passage ahead, a girl’s bright, almost-festive patter running along ahead of his last-ever Weston Walking Tour, as though she and the hulking marine, and not Weston, are in charge.
Meanwhile the mud walls widen as the path goes deeper. The tunnels are lined with people, their pale faces gleaming wherever he flashes his miner’s lamp, and it is terrifying. The man who tried so hard to keep all the parts of his life exactly where he put them has lost any semblance of control; the orphan who lived alone because it was safest is trapped in the earth, crowded—no, surrounded—by souls, dozens, perhaps hundreds of others with their needs, their grief and sad secrets and emotional demands.
The pressure of their hopes staggers him.
All at once the lifelong solo flier comprehends what he read in Ted Bishop’s face that day, and why he fled. Educated, careful, and orderly and self-contained as Lawrence Weston tries so hard to be, only a tissue of belief separates him from them.
Now they are all around him.
He has forgotten how to breathe. One more minute and … He doesn’t know. Frothing, he wheels, cranked up to fight the devil if he has to, anything to get out of here: he’ll tear the hulking veteran apart with teeth and nails, offer money, do murder or, if he has to, die in the attempt—anything to escape the dimly perceived but persistent, needy humanity seething underground.
As it turns out, he doesn’t have to do any of these things. The bulky vet lurches forward with a big-bear rumble.
In the dimness ahead, a ragged, gravelly chorus responds:
The marine shoulders Weston aside. “Found ’em. Now, shove off. Round up your civilians and move ’em out.”
Miraculously, he does. He pulls the WESTON WALKS placard out of the back of his jeans and raises it, pointing the headlamp so his people will see the sign. Then he blows the silver whistle he keeps for emergencies and never had to use.
It makes the tunnels shriek.
“Okay,” he says with all the force he has left in his body. “Time to go! On to Fifth Avenue and…” He goes on in his best tour-guide voice; it’s a desperation move, but Weston is desperate enough to offer them anything. “The Russian Tea Room! I’ll treat. Dinner at the Waldorf, suites for the night, courtesy of Weston Walking Tours.”
Oddly, when they emerge into fresh air and daylight—
Safe at last in the Russian Tea Room, he knows which one she is, or thinks he knows, because unlike the others, she looks perfectly comfortable here: lovely woman with tousled hair, buff little body wrapped in a big gray sweater with sleeves pulled down over her fingertips; when she reaches for the samovar with a gracious offer to pour he is startled by a flash of black-rimmed fingernails. Never mind; maybe it’s a fashion statement he hasn’t caught up with.
Instead of leading his group to Times Square or Grand Central for the ceremonial send-off so he can fade into the crowd, he leaves them at the Waldorf, all marveling as they wait at the elevators for the concierge to show them to their complimentary suites.
Spent and threatened by his close encounter with life, Weston flees.
The first thing he does when he gets home is pull his ad and trash the business phone. Then he does what murderers and rape victims do in movies, after the fact: He spends hours under a hot shower, washing away the event. It will be days before he’s fit to go out. He quiets shattered nerves by numbering the beautiful objects in the ultimate safe house he has created, assuages grief with coffee and the day’s papers in the sunlit library, taking comfort from small rituals. He needs to visit his father’s Turner watercolor, stroke the smooth flank of the Brancusi marble in the foyer, study his treasure, a little Remington bronze.
When he does go out some days later, he almost turns and goes back in. The sexy waif from the tour is on his front steps. Same sweater, same careless toss of the head. The intrusion makes his heart stop and his belly tremble, but the girl who poured so nicely at the Russian Tea Room greets him with a delighted smile.
“I thought you’d never come out.”
“You have no right, you have no
“I live in the neighborhood.” She challenges him with that gorgeous smile.
How do you explain to a pretty girl that she has no right to track you to your lair? How can you tell any New Yorker that your front steps are private, specific only to you? How can you convince her that your life is closed to intruders, or that she is one?
He can’t. “I have to go!”
“Where are you—”
Staggered by a flashback—tunnel air repeating like something he ate—Weston is too disturbed to make polite excuses, beep his driver, manage any of the usual exit lines. “China!” he blurts, and escapes.
At the corner he wheels to make sure he’s escaped and gasps: “Oh!”
Following him at a dead run, she smashes into him with a stirring little
