Zoe ran from the shadows. At the corner there was no sign that the grate had been moved. She went to Emmett’s shop and looked in through the dirty window. Do I break in? she wondered. What if there’s an alarm? I should have brought a flashlight. How am I supposed to find Dad’s record in the dark, if it’s even in there? If Emmett took the record with him and I waste time inside, it won’t matter. He’ll be too far away for me to follow.
She wanted desperately to go into the shop. It was safe and dark and known. The idea of following Emmett into some unknown underground labyrinth terrified her. But there was this terrible feeling in the back of her mind, a feeling that told her that her father’s disc wasn’t in the shop. That out of spite or something worse Emmett had carried it underground, and that if she didn’t go after him soon, her father would be lost forever. She would have failed him twice.
Zoe went to the corner and knelt down to get a good grip on the grate. She pulled, but it didn’t budge. She knelt down and pulled again. Nothing. Zoe remembered Emmett’s grip on her arm and the surprising strength with which he’d held her. She sat down in the street and braced her feet against the curb. She wasn’t going to get this close to Emmett and her father and lose them both.
With both hands, she grabbed the far edge of the grate and pulled. The metal was wet and slimy, hard to hold on to. Finally, she felt the grate rise slowly away from the street. When it was a little more than halfway up, she let go and it fell backward toward her, leaving the sewer open.
She leaned her head into the opening. The smell reminded her of the time she and some friends had sneaked into the house where old Mrs. Asher had died and no one had found her for a week. Zoe pulled up the edge of her hoodie, covering her nose and mouth. Just inside the opening, she could see steel rungs, like a ladder, set into the concrete.
She turned herself quickly into position and lowered a foot into the opening. When one foot touched a rung, she stepped down and pulled her arms inside. Below street level, she was instantly swallowed by impenetrable darkness and a death-house reek of dead old women.
Zoe held her breath and started down.
Seven
At the bottom of the ladder the ground was a soft and yielding soup of slippery muck. It compressed beneath her, as if she were walking on damp leaves. No matter how hard Zoe tried, however, she couldn’t pretend that what she was walking on was anything but the collective filth and waste of the city that loomed twenty feet over her head.
The damp soaked through her sneakers and socks, but she kept walking, breathing through her mouth, afraid she might throw up. She moved quietly, carefully, trying not to splash or make any noise. She kept a hand on the wall, feeling her way along as her eyes adjusted to the dark.
Even when she grew accustomed to the gloom, Zoe couldn’t see much, just the vague outlines of the tunnel’s edges where concrete sections were joined and metal service doors dripping with a colorless fungus that hung in ragged strands like Spanish moss.
Every now and then she’d pass under a manhole or a street grate and shafts of feeble light shone down to her. Then she would be submerged again in the dark, and each time it was like a black wave pulling her down to the bottom of the ocean.
She followed Emmett by listening for him. He was well ahead of her, and because he thought he was alone, he didn’t make any effort to be quiet. He splashed casually through the black sewer muck, singing as he went. His voice echoed down the concrete tunnels, sounding to Zoe like a ghost choir. The tune sounded like something very old and from far away. She’d heard it in the shop, a song full of mystery, vengeance, and death: “Walk on Gilded Splinters.”
Zoe focused her mind on the sound, on Emmett’s song, and not on her surroundings. With each step the stronger part of her mind, the part that kept her panicky self in check, repeated, I’m not afraid. Dad is waiting for me. Just keep walking. I’m not afraid.
She lost track of the time. The dark never let up, nor did the stink of the place, but something changed ahead. There was faint yellow light around the next turn. She walked as fast as she could, careful not to splash. In a few minutes, Zoe reached one of the rusted iron service doors. It was half open, and when she listened, she could hear Emmett’s song echoing from the passage beyond. Lowering her head to get through the door, she took a tentative step inside the new passage. The light was brighter a few yards ahead. She stepped into the passage and stopped in surprise at what she saw. The air, the bare stone walls, the ancient rotting carpet that ran along the floor, a whole different world from the sewer tunnels. But it was more than the carpet and the light. The place gave off a static charge like it was alive and very old. Zoe started toward the light.
She could breathe through her nose here. The horrid stink of sewer didn’t seem to extend beyond the metal hatch. The bare stone walls were smooth and covered in glyphs, like the ones on the special records in Emmett’s shop. The marks covered the walls down the whole length of the corridor. Water. Snakes. The moon. Black dogs.
The light in the tunnel came from candles held in sconces all along the walls. Wax dripped down the wall like the liquid on stalactites and pooled on the floor. Rats ran ahead of Zoe, zigzagging across the carpet.
The passage ended at a stone staircase that descended at a steep angle to another tunnel below. The gray stone steps looked polished, worn smooth by centuries of use. But who used them? Zoe wondered.
Going down the steps, she wondered if she’d hurt herself without realizing it and thrown herself off balance. Each step she took was more uncomfortable than the last, and more than once she fell as she moved from one step to another. A few steps later, she realized that there was a simple explanation: the staircase was changing as she descended, with each step slightly higher than the one before. By the time she reached the bottom, she had to lower herself over the edge of each step and jump to the one below.
She was in a tunnel that was much larger than any of the others. Its vaulted ceiling towered over her head, lost in the moving shadows cast by the flickering candles set along the walls. Ahead of her was a set of enormous wooden doors, towering almost as high as the tunnel itself. An entrance for giants, she thought. The doors were ajar, so it was easy for her to slip between them. As she stepped through the doors she paused. Emmett’s song was a distant echo ahead of her.
Beyond the doors were a series of dark stone chambers. Each of them was filled with lost trinkets and abandoned junk washed down from the city. Nearby was a pile of broken dolls as big as Zoe’s house. Their tattered faces and glittering black eyes stared blankly at the ancient walls. Scattered throughout the chambers were mountains of rusting bicycles, water-swollen books and porn magazines, snowdrifts of wedding photos and hills of wallets, many open, creating shiny plastic islands of driver’s licenses, credit cards, and school photos of smiling children, now lost and sodden underground.
There was a chamber filled with women’s shoes and one with money-coins pushed to one side and bills to the other, a lost fortune. Enough to last her mother and her for the rest of their lives, Zoe thought, if she could figure out some way to bring it all home with her. Stacks of glittering gold coins lay at her feet and she was tempted to take some, but Emmett’s song was growing fainter, so she moved on.
The next chamber brought her to an abrupt stop. It was divided into separate rooms, each almost as large and packed as the previous chambers. But instead of junk, these rooms held more personal items. In one room were bundles of hair, neatly tied with string and attached to a paper label holding a name and more of the symbols Zoe knew from Emmett’s records. Next to that was a room full of small bottles, each of which contained a single tooth. The teeth, too, were labeled. In another room were stacks of marked vials that each held a drop of blood. In the final chamber were thousands of small, clear bottles. Each bottle was labeled with the word Tears and a name. Zoe stared at Emmett’s awful collection, feeling cold inside. She wondered if Emmett had bothered to add her false tooth to that pile.