The Manhattan Hunt Club

CHAPTER 18

In the cold, bright glare of the subway station, Heather Randall could clearly see how worn Keith Converse looked. His face seemed to have aged ten years since the day before, when she'd seen him in the oddly similar brightness of the morgue. The gentler light in Jeff's apartment had softened the creases that were etched not only in his forehead but in his cheeks and jowls as well. The crinkles around his eyes had deepened into crow's-feet, as if all the worry, anger, and frustration that he'd managed to bottle up through the months leading up to Jeff's trial had now broken through.

The platform was deserted except for a solitary man who had apparently just gotten off a train that was now roaring into the tunnel on its way farther uptown. There was no sign at all of the woman Heather had seen from Jeff's window. The lone passenger vanished up the stairs, the sound of his footsteps fading into silence along with the rumbling of the train.

"She must have gotten on that train," Keith muttered.

But even as he spoke, Heather pointed toward the far end of the platform. "Down there!"

For a second Keith saw nothing, then a flicker of movement caught his eye. It was the woman.

She wasn't on the platform, but on the track itself, backing slowly away from the bright light of the station, painstakingly pulling her cart behind her.

"What's she doing?" Keith asked. "Where's she going?"

Heather was already running along the platform. "Ma'am?" she called out, her voice reverberating on the tiles, echoing back through the empty station, almost drowning out Heather's next words: "We just want to talk to you for a minute!"

The woman's eyes widened, but instead of pausing, she moved a little faster, stumbling and almost collapsing onto the gravel beneath the tracks before she caught herself.

Now Keith was running, too, and twenty feet before Heather reached the end of the platform he sprinted past her. "Wait!" he called. "Stop!" But when he came to the end of the platform, the old woman had vanished into the darkness.

Suddenly, all the emotions churning inside Keith erupted in a single desperate howl.

"JEFF!"

Then once more, even louder: "JEFF…"

His son's name, twisted and contorted with Keith's own anguished frustration, resounded off the concrete walls of the subway tunnel, coming back again and again, mutating into something that sounded almost like laughter, taunting him, mocking him. The terrible sound finally died away with one last echo that, like the old woman, was lost to the blackness of the tunnel.

Turning away from the dark maw, Keith headed back toward Heather, his shoulders slumped, his step slowed. Then, his desperate cry into the darkness having faded away, he heard something.

Faint-so faint as to be barely audible-he thought he heard a single word drift out of the darkness:

"Dad…"

It was a whisper that died away so quickly, Keith wasn't sure he heard it at all, but when he turned to look at Heather, her eyes were wide and her face had gone pale.

"You heard it, didn't you?" he whispered, almost afraid to ask the question.

Time stopped as he waited for Heather to reply. Just when he thought he could stand the silence no longer, she said, "I heard… something, but I'm not sure what."

Three more times, Keith called out Jeff's name, and after each shout died slowly away, they waited to hear a response. There was none.

Though it seemed impossible, the light was even worse than the darkness.

The brilliant halogen beam felt like a knife that had been jabbed directly into his brain, a searing brightness that was physically painful. When it first lashed out of the darkness, he had been shocked into absolute stillness-that same instinctive motionlessness wild animals use as their first defense against a predator. An instant later, though, instinct had given way to reason and he braced himself for the shot he was certain would follow the light. When it didn't come and he heard a voice ordering him not to move, he raised a hand to shield his eyes from the light.

"I said freeze, motherfucker." The voice reverberated off the walls of the tunnel, echoing back at them from behind.

The shot didn't come, but from somewhere above them, there was a muted rumbling as a subway train passed in another tunnel.

"Who are you?" the voice demanded as the sound of the train died away.

Jeff glanced over at Jagger, who was standing beside him, squinting tightly as he attempted to pierce the glare, his huge hands clenched into fists.

"We're just trying to find our way out," Jeff called back, not quite answering the question.

The light began to move closer, the brilliance of its beam holding them at bay as effectively as if it had been a shotgun.

Then, as suddenly as the light went on, it blinked off, and Jeff was plunged into yet a new kind of blindness. Now a black circle hung directly in front of his eyes, a circle that moved wherever his eyes moved, blotting out everything behind it. The halogen beam had burned into his retinas, leaving behind a negative image of the light that was no longer there.

"Can't see much, can you?" the voice taunted, so close now that Jeff shrank back. "Fuck with me, and I'll make sure you never see anything again. Got it?"

Jeff opened his mouth, ready to agree to anything that might push back the shroud of darkness that had fallen over him once again. But before he could speak, he heard a sound, drifting out of the darkness, then flitting away again so quickly he thought he must have imagined it.

But no! There it was again.

A memory rose unbidden from his mind, a memory from when he was a little boy, no more than four or maybe five. He'd been outside after supper one night, chasing fireflies, not paying any attention to where he was going. When the last firefly had finally vanished, flitting away from his grasping hands, he'd realized he was lost. A wave of terror washed over him, and he looked around frantically in the darkness, trying to see where he was. Then, just as he was about to start sobbing, he'd heard a voice.

His father's voice.

Calling out to him in the darkness.

It had been his father's voice that led him home that night.

Now, in the terrible blackness of the tunnel, he was hearing that voice again.

"DAD!" The single word burst from his throat before he even thought about it.

A flash of brilliance slashed into his eyes, and an instant later a fist sank deep into his gut.

The light went out again.

"I said don't fuck with me," the unseen man grunted as Jeff dropped to his knees, clutching his gut. "So I'm gonna ask you once more-you got it, asshole?"

"I-I got it," Jeff managed to mutter.

Jagger, meanwhile, hadn't spoken. The man said to him: "Make up your mind, big boy-behave yourself, or start wandering around in the dark all alone. Even guys like you get afraid of the dark. So I'm asking you for the last time-you got it?"

"I got it," Jagger replied, but Jeff could hear the fury in his voice.

"So here's what's gonna happen," the voice said. "I'm gonna turn the light back on, and you guys are gonna walk ahead of me. Not far-maybe a hundred yards. I got a nest down there. When we get there, I'll decide."

The light flashed back on, and the invisible man circled around until he was behind them. Now the beam of light slashed through the blackness of the tunnels, and as Jeff's eyes recovered from their blindness, he got a clear look at where he was for the first time since he'd left the subway platform.

The tunnel was lined with cracked and rotting concrete, so old that whatever care had been put into its original finish had long since worn away. The remaining uneven surface was streaked with black grime. Small stalactites had formed where seeping water had leached lime out of the concrete. The remains of a rusting railroad track ran along the floor of the tunnel, but sections of the rails were gone completely, while others were missing all their spikes. The ties were so badly rotted that the few remaining spikes looked like they could be pulled loose with a single yank. Here and there on the ceiling were the remains of rudimentary light fixtures, but not only had the bulbs long since disappeared, even the bases had been broken. The only sign of the electricity that had once powered them was a couple of dangling wires, their ends stripped of insulation.

"Up there," the man behind them said as they came abreast of an alcove. Jeff, followed by Jagger, scrambled up onto the small platform.

Though it was nothing but a dying fire in a trash barrel, the guttering blaze seemed as welcome to Jeff as a Yule log burning on the hearth of a New England inn on Christmas Eve.

The halogen beam suddenly vanished, momentarily blinding Jeff once again. When his vision cleared, the man who only moments ago had threatened to kill him stood revealed by the flickering firelight. Thin to the point of emaciation, his eyes were sunk deep into their sockets and his complexion was pasty. There was a feral quality to his face. Though he wasn't more than five feet six and couldn't have weighed more than 140 pounds, he didn't look the least bit intimidated by Jagger, let alone him.

And he couldn't have been more than twenty years old.

"You kill me, and you'll never get out of here," he said.

Jagger seemed to consider his options for a moment, then his eyes swept the alcove. "You got any food?"

The scrawny man nodded. "You like track rabbit?"

"I like whatever you got," Jagger growled. "So where is it?"

The man tilted his head toward the corner. "Behind the barrel." He smiled, revealing a row of broken teeth. "Got three today-guess I musta known you were coming." He moved around the barrel, picked up a dented and charred coffee can, and handed it to Jagger. "You want to clean ‘em?"

Jagger looked down into the can and made a choking noise as it clattered to the floor. It rolled toward the tracks and its contents spilled out.

Three dead rats, their heads crushed and matted with blood, lay on the filthy concrete.

The scrawny man's grin widened as Jeff backed away. "What's the matter? You don't like rabbit?" Pulling a knife from his pocket, he opened its blade, squatted down, and picked up one of the rats. The tip of the knife disappeared into the rat's belly. With a quick flick of his wrist, the man slit the rodent's hide all the way up to its mouth. He dropped the knife and the fingers of one hand disappeared under the creature's skin. A moment later he jerked the skin loose so it hung, inside out, from the rat's feet. Using the knife, he cut the feet and tail away and tossed the skin out onto the tracks.

Immediately, another rat scurried out of the shadows, snatched the bloody skin and disappeared.

The man disemboweled the carcass, dropped it into the coffee can, then went to work on the next one. In a few more minutes the job was finished-all three of the rats had been skinned and cleaned, the discarded skins and guts disappearing almost as soon as they hit the tracks.

"They're not so bad, once you get used to them," the man said as he laid a rusty piece of grating over the barrel. He set the coffee can on it. "Tastes like chicken." He glanced from Jeff to Jagger, then back to Jeff. "You don't have to eat it. Nobody does when they first come down here. But like I said, you get used to it." His cold, broken-toothed grin once more flashed across his face. "After a while, you get used to everything down here."