Because the club was so quiet — the unregistered aliens Bentley liked to hire for less than minimum wages sweeping up the floor now, David Sullivan preparing the bar for tomorrow — he was able to hear the whimper.
His first impression was that it belonged to an animal. A cat, perhaps, caught somewhere in the walls.
Then he remembered the piece of plywood over the duct opening in the closet wall. A cat lover, he wondered if a feline of some kind might not be caught down there.
He went over to the drawer and took out a long silver tube of flashlight and then went back to the closet and got down on his hands and knees and put his hand on the plywood rectangle again.
Still loose, it was easily pulled away from the nails mooring it.
He pushed the beam inside the wide mouth of the dusty metal duct and then poked his head inside.
He saw what was down there instantly and just as instantly, he recoiled. His stomach knotted, he felt real nausea, and he banged the crown of his head pulling it from the duct.
He’d seen what had made the whimpering sound, all right.
My God had he seen it.
After he had composed himself, and still armed with the flashlight, he replaced the piece of plywood, moved backward out of the closet, stood up, Finished dressing, and then went out into the club to speak with David Sullivan.
“Bentley around?” Hanratty asked.
Sullivan sighed. “No, he and Sally split already.”
“Good.”
“What?”
“Oh. Nothing.” Instinctively, Hanratty knew enough to keep what he’d seen to himself. “I’m going down to the basement.”
Sullivan grinned. “It’s okay, Richard. We’ve got a bathroom up here.” Then, more seriously, “What’s down in the basement?”
“A sub-basement, if I remember right.”
“Yes. We’re dose enough to the river that the sewer system runs right next to the sub-basement, which used to be kind of a retaining wall before this part of the city burned down in the early part of the century.”
Now it was Hanratty’s turn to grin. “How do you know all this stuff, kid?”
Sullivan snapped his white bar towel like a whip. Hanratty had no doubt who the kid was whipping. “Well, when the woman you love spends all her time with a jerk like Bentley, you’ve got a lot of time to read.” Then he shrugged. “Actually, I heard it on the news the other night. This whole area of the sewer system has become a refuge for some of the homeless who are wandering around.”
“Poor bastards,” Hanratty said. He nodded to the fifth of Chivas sitting next to the register. “How about a shot?”
“Sure.” Sullivan poured and handed the shot glass to Hanratty. “It’s on Bentley.”
The first level of the basement was what you would expect to find — essentially a storehouse of supplies to keep the lounge running, everything from large cardboard boxes of napkins and paper plates to crates of glassed olives and cocktail cherries. The majority of the storage room, naturally enough, was taken up by tall and seemingly endless rows of brand name booze. The basement walls had been finished in imitation knotty pine and the floor had been given a perfunctory coat of green paint. Everything was tidy and dry and smelled of dust and the vapors of natural gas from the large furnace unit in the east corner.
Duct work of various types ran everywhere. It took Hanratty ten minutes to figure out which of the pieces of silver metal fed into his closet. Once he concluded that he’d found the right piece, he found its track along the ceiling over to the door to the sub-basement, which was just where he suspected it would lead.
He had not forgotten what he’d seen in the duct work earlier. He would never forget.
It waited for him on the other side of the sub-basement door. He could sense it.
He clicked on the flashlight, felt his stomach grab in anticipation, and put his hand on the door leading to the sub-basement.
It was locked.
He spent the next five minutes trying everything from the edge of a chisel to a screwdriver — he found a tool kit in the corner — but nothing worked. The lock remained inviolate.
He raised his head, finally, and shone the light along the duct work leading over the door and beyond. He needed to find a section he could pry open.
This time from the tool kit he took a hammer and an even larger screwdriver. He went to work.
In all, it took twenty minutes. He cut his hands many times — he’d done sheet metal work two summers in college and it had always been a bitch — and he was soaked and cold with sweat.
His work complete, he took two cases of Cutty Sark, piled one on the other, and used them as a ladder.
Then he crawled up inside the duct work and started his inching passage down the angling metal cave till he reached its end.
His first reaction, once inside, was of claustrophobia. He thought of all those horror films he’d seen over the years about being buried alive. What if he never got out of here...?
He kept moving, knowing that was his only hope.
Fortunately, the passage was straight, no sudden turns to block or trap him.
After five minutes he began smelling more than dust and sheet metal and the rat droppings that he crushed beneath his hands and knees. He began smelling — river water.
Then the duct ended abruptly and he let himself drop from it into a huge concrete tunnel that was obviously the sewer system David Sullivan had been talking about. Everything smelled fetid. As he played the flashlight around on the walls, he saw red, blue, yellow and green obscenities spray-painted on the filthy gray arching walls. Rats with burning, hungry eyes fed on the carcass of what had apparently been an opossum. Broken soda bottles, crushed cans, sticks with leaves that trailed like dead hair all floated in the foot of filthy water that ran down the curving floor of the sewer.
He spent the next few minutes getting oriented, moving the beam around, fascinated and sickened at what he saw. To think that people actually lived here...
Then he heard the whimpering again and when he wheeled around he saw, high up on this side of the wall, a ragged hole in the concrete.
The creature he had earlier glimpsed was, Hanratty was sure, inside that hole.
Steeling himself for his second glimpse of the thing, he walked through the dirty water until he was directly beneath the hole.
“Why don’t you come down?”
Nothing.
“Why don’t you come down?” Hanratty said, his voice reverberating off the peaked ceiling and the vast stretch of concrete cave.
Still nothing.
“I won’t hurt you. I want to help you.” He paused. “You’ve been leaving those songs for me, haven’t you?”
The whimpering sound — this time it was more like mewling — began again.
He stood on his tiptoes and played his light inside the dark hole a few feet above him. The opening made him think of a bird’s nest. The reeking dampness choked him.
The opening was perhaps four feet deep and three feet high. Inside he saw a six-pack of Coke, a loaf of Wonderbread, an open package of Oscar Meyer luncheon meat, several magazines including Vogue and Harper's and then female clothes of all kinds, from undergarments to dresses and sweaters. Spread across the floor were several mismatched blankets. At this point he raised the beam and waved it in the rear of the opening, where it angled down sharply to meet the retaining wall behind.
This was where he found her.
This time her face wasn’t deeply pitted with what appeared to be radiation burns of some kind. Nor was her head sleek and bald and likewise tufted with terrible burns. No, this time she wore a mask to cover her hideousness, a rubber Cinderella mask from the Disney version of the classic fairy tale.