Vespers

Ten

Grand Central Station is the largest train terminal in the world. It covers nearly fifty acres in the heart of Manhattan and is laced with tunnels stacked seven levels deep in places. The lowest of these tunnels lies more than two hundred and fifty feet underground.

Dozens of the tunnels are used for either commuter or subway trains. Most of those are on the top two levels. On the other five levels are dozens more tunnels, many of which were begun but never finished. They were abandoned, sealed off, and forgotten when funds ran out, when walls or ceilings or floors leaked, or when needs or technologies changed. At least half of these dark, damp labyrinths are unmapped. Over the years, homeless people opened many of the tunnels and began living there.

Joyce knew a little of this history from her studies of urban bats and their habitats. But she had never imagined she’d be down here. Like the night, it was fascinating.

Arvids slid a flashlight from a loop in his belt and shined it ahead. They could see about ten feet down the tracks.

“Stay behind me, single file,” he said.

They walked nearly toe-to-heel, with Joyce in the middle. She looked back. Leaving the station was like pushing off in a rowboat.The land sunk away quickly, and the sense of being in a new and dangerous element, on an adventure, quickly took hold. Apart from Arvids’s flashlight and the dull, yellowish bulbs stuck in the ceiling every ten feet or so, there was no illumination down here. No hint of daylight. No fresh air.

“What do we do if a train comes along?” Joyce asked.

Before Arvids could answer, Joyce felt the ground begin to quake. It wasn’t like the gentle rumble a rider felt on the platform. It rattled up her ankles, rolled to her waist, and crawled down her arms. She felt it in her fingertips. A moment later the iron columns and tracks began to brighten and glow to the left. Then everything was washed out in a blast of white light from the headlight of the train. The sound was painfully loud.

Arvids had motioned for them to stand to the right, closer to the wall. They stopped walking and covered their ears as the train lumbered past. It squealed loudly as it stopped at the station. Joyce’s body was still trembling, fine and fuzzy like a tuning fork.

Arvids shouted back through the cottony silence, “What we do is just step aside!”

“I see,” she said.

When the train left the station, the platform was empty and the sense of isolation was even more pronounced. The white-tile wall continued for another few yards. When it ended there was only darkness to the right, to the left, and beyond the glare of the flashlight. Walking here was a little like descending a staircase without looking down.

Gentry leaned close to her ear. “In case you were wondering, you’re nowhere near the third rail.”

“That did cross my mind,” Joyce admitted. “Where is it?”

“Over to the left, underneath the current bar. See it?”

She looked. She craned. She squinted.

“That raised, L-shaped piece outside the running rail,” Gentry said, leaning close and pointing.

“Got it,” she said. “Have you spent a lot of time down here?”

“As a matter of fact, I have,” Gentry said. “When I was on the narcotics squad.”

“You were a narc?” Arvids said. “I didn’t know that.”

“Why did that bring you down into the tunnels?” Joyce asked.

“Dealers from Connecticut used to toss stuff from the trains, just in case cops were waiting for them in the station,” Gentry said. “They had goons down here to pick the stuff up.”

“Man,” Arvids said. “I’m impressed. You were a narc. I don’t see much action here and I’ve been thinking about a change. Narcking, Violent Predator Task Force, Worst-of-the-Worst Task Force-those are the kinds of thing you do toreally test yourself. To do some good, too, but also to see if you’ve got the stuff. You know what I mean.”

“I do. That’s one of the reasons I did it.”

“It’s like when my dad was in the army and he said he wanted to get some combat in,” Arvids went on, “even though he didn’t really. He just wanted to see how he’d do. He ended up in Vietnam, and it turned out he had more steel in him than he thought.”

A second train charged by, its light harsh in the deepening darkness. The train was farther from the station and was moving faster than the first train. This time Joyce didn’t hum when it passed. She rattled.

When the train had receded, Joyce tapped Arvids on the shoulder and stopped. “Would you shine your light up for a second?”

“Sure thing.” Arvids turned his flashlight toward the top of the tunnel.

The ceiling was about twelve feet above them. There were concrete ledges, iron girders, and discoloration from water seepage. There was a lightly metallic odor coming from the damp metal. Beneath it, in the distance, Joyce could already smell the distinctive odor of the guano.

“What are you looking for?” Gentry asked.

“Cockroaches,” she said. “If bats moved in somewhere ahead, the roaches would have moved out. Like at your apartment.”

Arvids shined the flashlight slowly along the ceiling. “I don’t see any, but they travel pretty fast. And they could have gone in about a million different directions. This is a very long tunnel.”

“How long?”

“This particular trunk heads up to the middle of Central Park, which is about two and a half miles north. Then it doubles back and heads southwest to Penn Station.”

“I didn’t realize the two stations were connected,” Joyce said.

“Everythingis connected through these tunnels,” Arvids said. “All the train lines-commuter, subway, everything.”

Joyce felt a cool draft from the left and asked Arvids to shine the light over. About six feet away was a concrete wall with a hole cut in the center. The opening was about two yards up from the ground, a yard across, and nearly a yard tall at its highest point. The edges of the hole were jagged, as though it had been punched out with a hammer.

“What’s that?” Joyce asked.

“It’s probably the work of the tunnel people,” he said.

“The who?”

“The homeless people who live underneath the train tunnels. We had most of them cleared out, but they keep coming back. The tunnel people live on this level, and the mole people are on the lower levels. We think there are about five hundred homeless living down here altogether, but we’re not sure.”

“You’re kidding,” Joyce said. “There are that many homeless people here?”

Arvids nodded. “They’ve got communities with a mayor, teachers-it’s really very organized.”

“Does anyone ever go to them?” Joyce asked. “Help them?”

“We have an outreach program here at the station,” Arvids replied. “But they don’t like intruders. Some of them come up for food and supplies, but most of them never leave the tunnels.”

“And why would they make a hole like this?”

“Could be a short cut. Or sometimes they do it for ventilation, especially during the summer.”

“Amazing.” Joyce asked Arvids to keep the flashlight on the jagged hole. Stepping high and long over the third rail, she went over and examined it. There was no guano and no smell of guano coming from inside. She returned to the group. Gentry didn’t look happy.

“I was careful,” she said.

Gentry made a face. “Nothing there?”

“Nothing. Let’s go.”

They continued walking between the tracks.A third train passed. This time Joyce felt as if it was the intruder, not her.

It was not at all surprising to the scientist that the deeper they went into the tunnel, the more excited and contented she became. The act of creeping around had always made Nancy Joyce feel free. It probably came from growing up with a father and an older brother who liked war movies and Westerns. Some of Joyce’s earliest memories were of sitting on the floor to the side of a big TV. She would play with Colorforms or her Etch-a-Sketch and look up whenever the TV grew quiet. She didn’t like the shooting or talking parts, but she always watched when cowboys or soldiers crawled through the mud, crept under barbed wire, or moved stealthily around corners or mountainsides. Soon Joyce began creeping around by herself, daring her brother, Peter, to catch her, and then squeezing behind the sofa or under the piano bench where he couldn’t fit. But Peter’s armscould fit, and he usually dragged his sister out and punished her with a tickle attack to the sides and underarms. When Joyce was seven she began poking through the thick, nighttime woods on her own. There was something bold about taking each new step. Something a little claustrophobic about the dark. She realized much later that that was one of the reasons night appealed to her. Everything seemed so close, so intimate. Even the danger.

But…

There was always a but. While Joyce felt at home with the unknown, she hated not knowing things. And the past fifteen or so hours had severely tested her patience. When she was a graduate student at New York University, doing fieldwork with Professor Lowery-who also became her first lover, deep in a bat cave in the Pyrenees-the older man worried about her low threshold for frustration. He advised his pupil to look at puzzles with a relaxed mind, to view them as an opportunity to add something to the annals of science. Unfortunately, Joyce just couldn’t think like that.

“You doing okay?” Gentry asked.

His voice startled her. For a moment, Joyce felt as if she’d been alone. “I’m fine. Why?”

“Just making sure. A lot of things can get to you down here. Sore feet. Thirst. Nerves.”

“No, I’m good.”

Gentry put his hands on her shoulders and moved around her. He sidled up to Arvids. “How well does your radio work down here?”

“Depends on how far down you go or how many walls get between you and the operator. So far I’ve never had a problem. Why?”

“Just curious. We’ve had trouble with our radios with all the new construction in midtown. The layers of electronics going into offices and residential buildings are acting like walls. Say,” Gentry turned to Joyce, “you said on TV that bats aren’t bothered by microwaves.”

“That’s right.”

“What about electronic noise? Could a city full of it draw them to a place or disorient them?”

“Draw them, no. Most bats ignore any sound beyond an average radius of fifty yards. And within that radius they pay attention only to sounds made by fellow bats or potential prey or predators.”

“Do they listen the same way humans do,” Gentry asked, “or do they use those echos?”

“Mechanically, bat hearing is the same as human hearing, albeit much more sensitive. When they echolocate, they ignore other sounds, pretty much the way people do when they’re talking in a subway or at a bar. The rest of the time bats listen the way other animals do.”

Arvids asked, “If there are still any bats down here, will they hear us coming?”

“They can hear an insect walking on sand six feet away.”

“I guess that would make us sound like a brass band.”

“Fife and drum corps would be more accurate,” Joyce said. “If there are bats within a mile of here, they heard our breathing and heartbeats about the time we entered the tunnel. To answer your other question, Detec-Robert,” Joyce went on, “electronics can disorient bats. Certain kinds of tiger moth emit high-frequency clicks that turn the normal flow of echo information into gibberish. We’ve been able to duplicate those signals in a lab.”

“Stealth moths,” Arvids said. “Nature is amazing.”

“Totally,” Joyce agreed. “Electronics can also confuse bats, but only if they happen to replicate a known sound-for example, a baby bat calling to its mother or a female to a male. And once the bat got a look or whiff of the computer or fax machine or whatever it happened to be, and saw that it wasn’t a fellow bat or prey, it would break off at once.”

“Pretty clever creatures.”

“They’re one of a kind,” she said proudly. “Did you ever hear of Operation X-Ray?”

Gentry said he hadn’t.

“During the Second World War, the Allies came up with a plan to drop thousands of bats from high-altitude bombers over Japanese cities. Each bat was going to be equipped with a large wax capsule strapped to its back. As the bats flew down, their body temperature would slowly melt the wax. Inside the capsule was a highly flammable liquid that would ignite when exposed to air. The bats were trained to fly toward certain sounds-air raid sirens, railroad whistles, maritime bells. They were also conditioned to fly toward searchlights. The idea was that they’d roost in strategic buildings in Japanese cities, self-immolate, and burn the buildings to the ground.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No. And there was no way to stop the bats. At night, even the best sharpshooters would have had an impossible time trying to gun them down. And even then there was always the risk that a bullet would penetrate the wax, set the bat on fire, and accomplish the mission.”

Gentry said, “I can just imagine what you think of the plan.”

“Why? Because bats were dying?”

“Well, yes.”

Joyce shook her head. “I’m not an animal rights activist. I hate cats, I enjoy hunting and eating deer and boar, and I’m all for using mice as medical test subjects.I lost a father to brain cancer and a grandfather to pancreatic cancer. I’d rather lose mice.”

“Hear, hear,” Arvids said.

“Besides, the bats were bred especially for Operation X-Ray. I think the plan was inspired. By targeting specific buildings the military could save human lives on the ground and in the air.”

“So what happened?” Gentry asked.

“During test runs in the desert, several dozen bats proved to be smarter than the scientists who’d conditioned them. They flew off and returned to where they were trained-bats have an incredible homing sense-and burned down the barracks.”

“Stealth moths and commando bats,” Arvids said. “Man, even zoologists see more action than I do.”

It took nearly half an hour of moving slowly through the darkness before they came to where the maintenance worker had fainted. The mound of guano was lying beneath a girder, between two sets of tracks. Joyce took the flashlight from Arvids. She circled the mound slowly. Arvids put his hand in front of his mouth. Gentry winced.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Joyce said.

“Jesus,” Gentry said. “The size alone probably put the maintenance man out, once he realized what it was.”

“The size is incredible, but so is the singular consistency,” Joyce said. “This is not a typical bat mound. This is like something you’d find in the elephant cage at the zoo.”

“That’d be a new one for the Transit Authority,” Arvids said from behind his splayed fingers. “An elephant infestation.”

“No, this was definitely left here by bats.” Joyce moved in closer. “The smell alone tells you that. The point is, when bats cluster in a small area like this, the guano falls in different ways, at different times. You can usually see the separate segments, different color and texture.”

“Like horse apples,” Gentry said.

“Exactly.”

“Excuse me, but this is more than I wanted to know,” Arvids said. He turned away.

Joyce shined the flashlight almost directly overhead. There were two horizontal concrete columns built perpendicular to the track. A naked metal girder, rusted from seeping water, was stuck between them. There were traces of guano from one side of the girder to the other. “What I don’t understand is why the bats would have come here, done this, and then left.”

“Like you said before,” Gentry pointed out, “this could be a migration rest area.”

“No. In that case the guano would have been spread across the tunnel, not centralized here.”

“Then how many bats do you think did this?” Gentry asked.

“I don’t know that either.” The scientist turned the flashlight back on the mound and walked around the base. “There’s a lot of spread at the bottom of the pile. See that?” She shined the flashlight on a wide, murky pool of liquid surrounding the mound.

“New York’s an extremely leaky island. River water and rain are constantly seeping in and dissolving soft biodegradable matter. Groundwater like that along with vibration from passing trains caused the waste to settle. And the weight of the mound caused the fluid content to sink and separate, compacting the mass above. So it’s impossible to say how many animals contributed to this or when it was started. It could have been a hundred bats over a few days or several thousand bats over a few hours.”

“Severalthousand bats?” Gentry asked. “There could really be that many bats down here?”

“If this tunnel goes on for as long as Arvids says it does, a thousand bats could easily have gotten in. Even though cockroaches scatter when attacked, there would be enough insect life down here to sustain them. Silverfish, bugs of that type. Possibly bats from the park moved in here, not migratory ones.”

“Why?” Gentry asked. “It’s still warm.”

“All of the human activity during that rat sweep might have scared them away,” Joyce suggested. “The question is, why would bats have come to this one spot?”

“Would it help if you had samples of guano to study?” Gentry asked.

“No,” Joyce said. “But I do want some pictures. I can scan them into a computer and run some simulations.”

She tucked the flashlight under her arm and pulled a digital camera from her shoulder bag. She snapped photographs from several different heights and angles. Then she put the camera away and shined the light around. Across the tracks to the left was a tunnel.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“It’s a service tunnel,” Arvids said.

“Meaning?”

“The train crews do repairs there, store equipment.”

“Does it lead anywhere?”

“I don’t think so,” Arvids said. “Service tunnels are usually closed. They’re like caves.”

Joyce and Gentry both looked at Arvids.

Arvids grinned boyishly. “I knew it even as I said it. You want to go in there.”

“Bats are at home in tunnels,” Joyce explained, “but they really like caves.”