Minutes later, she stood at the edge of the 125th Street station’s pall of fluorescent light. She looked around the platform. There was just a hint of smoke in the air, but far off, perhaps a cigarette fire smoldering in a trash receptacle on the opposite platform. After a few moments, trains departed in both directions and the platforms were empty. There were security cameras but she trusted them to be permanently “under repair.” With a quick left-right glance, she crouched down and lowered herself onto the track bed and skulked into the dark. She kept in mind three lessons from last night’s homework — especially from the odd website, subwaytunnelhiking.com. First lesson, avoid the electrified third rail. It is not an urban legend. Second, listen and watch for the next train. Third, have a safe place to get to on the side so you won’t be swept away by oncoming trains. Easy. Common sense.
The flashlight did a passable job, but soon it was like a penlight in the Grand Canyon at night. She had a tube of visibility three feet wide and twenty feet long. The darkness that encroached beyond that perimeter was absolute.
Her feet moved ahead, searching with every step, feeling the low vibration of the ground. Her ears became her best sensors. Far away, the sounds of the trains played over the deep, incessant rumble of the metropolis above. On top of those, she could hear, like a metronome, a steady drip of water.
There was a junction in the tracks, and, sure enough, a set of dirty, unused rails led off to the side. She followed them. She stepped over and studied a berm of detritus, most of it covered with soot. The crumpled grocery-store cart lay on its side, black accretions giving it a fantastic countenance as if it once lay at the depths of some unvisited sea. Other piles were so covered as to be unrecognizable. She shuddered at what touched her feet as she shuffled through this debris. The smell of smoke was thicker now, as if the endless whoosh of underground air columns sucked in the essence of some distant garbage dump. Those juju drums throbbed in her nerves.
Now the tracks veered away at an acute angle. Her flashlight’s shaft of light caught faint eddies of smoke. She shot the beam front and back. Her nerves, on edge with the suggestion of a fire, jangled toward indecision. She stopped, then decided to quit and go back. Then she stopped again.
She stood there, frozen in indecision, casting the light in every direction. She noticed there were many bag- like lumps, probably grimed versions of those kitchen trash bags made of fibrous and flexible material. She moved closer to one, playing the light over a textured surface that seemed to have shrunken around disturbingly familiar bulges and angular lines. She sensed it before she could admit it. They were like cocoons, webbed and closed around desiccated forms. Like adults shrunken to the size of children. She played the light down to the end of one bag, and there protruded a black and silver Air Jordan with the toe bitten off. She thought she could see bony protrusions within the deeper shadows of that toeless sneaker. No matter, she’d seen enough. She turned, almost fell, and stumbled back toward the junction of tracks. She got a few hundred feet, probably within sight of the rail junction if her fading light would only shine that far. She heard a train approaching on the main track. She blew a deep breath of relief, knowing that her bearings were right and the 125th Street station was up ahead.
The train approached with a deep rumble, the ground beginning to vibrate. The whoosh of displaced air came, and with it the acrid taste of approaching combustion. She saw the train’s light up ahead, tinged with orange. Then it came barreling into view.
The entire face of the train was engulfed in sweeping wings of flame. It had prowed into a burning shipping crate. Loose metal bands like maimed robot tentacles were flailing about and sparking madly on the tracks. Like some sardonic fire-grinning banshee of the dark underground, it roared toward and then past her, all noise and smoke and fume.
From her point of view it seemed
In its wake the train left a firefly frenzy of swirling sparks and these promptly caught the trash berm on fire. It sputtered and flared. As she watched in horrified incredulity, some distant part of her mind recalled the fourth (or was it fifth?) famous lesson of subway hiking: Beware of track fires. She remembered the text: “They are not that unusual, given all the flammable crap that is discarded and accumulates down there. If you are near one, just go the other direction. Fast. They are oxygen hogs.”
No argument there, she thought. She could try to jump the fiery berm, but then, of course, she could never, ever do that. No way.
She turned and ran past the shopping cart and the field of ominous trash-bags.
Soon, she was far into the abandoned tunnel. The depth of the debris diminished until she could see the track-bed surface. The track fire smoldered far away and, ironically, she felt safer. She kept going until the first reflection of tiles from the Blain Place station showed in her light.
She walked up to the center of the platform, looking across at the ancient stop with her eyes almost at floor level. But for a grimy mattress, it would have looked enchanted, as if it hadn’t been touched in a hundred years. She pulled out the little map and shone the flashlight on it, then to the station walls and back. The door — where was the door? There it was. She smiled in relief.
Her ears pricked up; every hair on the back of her neck stood out like wires. She wasn’t sure where the sound came from. She turned off the light so she wasn’t a beacon, and listened. Something was moving, struggling in labored increments, as if it had been still and waiting for a long time. Another sound, as if something were reaching out and then settling down. Then a sound of air — not breathing exactly, but the slow intake of breath not necessarily human. Followed by the faint rattling of things hard and polished as they practiced once again the art of moving together.
It was coming.
It was as yet only a thing surmised out of the blackness from the gooshy scrunch of joints and the low whoosh of baggy body parts. The reptilian complex of her brain, however, knew exactly what it was.
She tried to hoist herself up on the platform, but it was too high. Her feet kicked, her chest wheezed, and she fell back, losing the flashlight.
It clattered away in the darkness somewhere beneath her. She froze with the realization that no nightmare could be this real, this weighted with the realization that she was in imminent and mortal danger. The sounds were getting closer and so distinct she could envision the source: the big, flaccid bag borne toward her by the steady progress of eight legs stepping in an orchestrated pattern. Cadence got down on her hands and knees and searched with the desperate hand-sweeps of the blind. The approaching thing, she knew to a certainty, was now hovering somewhere near, gloating, looking at her in full view. Her hand brushed something … a beer can … a rock … more dirt … and … there!
She grabbed the light, clicked it again and again until it turned on. It revealed the platform as she took three steps and hurtled herself up. She landed mostly up on the platform, rolled on over and stood up. The flashlight swept out its little halo, and just beyond its reach, she saw eight glints in a pattern.
The thing lurched forward.
Only the bits of image from her shaking, sweeping flashlight could be assembled in her mind into the horrible whole. The immense spider was now moving toward her in purposeful, creepy arachnid strides to match its ten-foot long legs. The details, the spikes and hairs on its legs, the glinting dashboard arrangement of eyes, the uncaring and hungry pincers, the sense and smell of rot and malevolence, all swirled in a chaos of movement and jiggling light. She turned toward the door, described on the map now bunched in her hand. What had it said? Locked? Key? Hidden key? She didn’t have
And now the race began. Her frantic hands trying to work the lock, the sound of the thing as it crept closer, the noise made by a talon groping up on the platform. The organic creak of a great bulk being lifted up as the leg took up a full weight, to be followed by another.
