“How’d you get that key?” Smithback asked.
“We have many skills in our community,” the man replied, pulling open the door and ushering the journalist through.
As the door shut behind Smithback, the blackness of night rushed forward to meet him. Realizing how much he’d instinctively relied on the dim light that had filtered down from the grates, Smithback had a sudden feeling of panic.
“Don’t you have a flashlight?” he stammered.
There was a scratching sound, then the flaring of a wooden match. In the flickering illumination, Smithback saw a series of cement steps leading downward as far as the matchlight penetrated.
Tail Gunner snapped his wrist and the match went out.
“Satisfied?” came the dull, monotonic voice.
“No,” Smithback replied quickly. “Light another.”
“When it is necessary.”
Smithback felt his way down the staircase, his hands spread on the cool slick walls for balance. They descended for what seemed an eternity. Suddenly, another match flared, and Smithback saw that the stairs ended in an enormous railroad tunnel, its silver tracks gleaming dully in the orange light.
“Where are we now?” Smithback asked.
“Track 100,” the man said. “Two levels down.”
“Are we there yet?”
The match flickered out, and darkness descended again.
“Follow me,” came the voice. “When I say stop, you stop. Immediately.”
They ventured onto the tracks. Smithback found himself fighting down panic once again as he stumbled over the iron rails.
“Stop,” came the voice. Smithback halted as another match flared. “See that?” Tail Gunner said, pointing to a gleaming bar of metal with a bright yellow line painted next to it. “That’s a third rail. It’s electrified. Don’t step on it.”
The match died out. Smithback heard the man take a few steps in the close, humid darkness.
“Light another!” he cried.
A match flared. Smithback took a broad step over the third rail.
“Are there any more of those?” he asked, pointing to the rail.
“Yes,” the little man said. “I’ll show you.”
“Jesus,” said Smithback as the match died. “What happens if you step on one?”
“The current explodes your body, blows off your arms, legs, and head,” the disembodied voice said. There was a pause. “It’s always better not to step on it.”
A match flared again, illuminating another yellow-painted rail. Smithback stepped gingerly over it, then watched as Tail Gunner pointed to a small hole in the far wall about two feet high and four across, chiseled out of the bottom of an old archway that had been bricked up with cinder block.
“We go down here,” Tail Gunner said.
Smithback could feel a hot draft coming up from below, tinged with a foul odor that made his gorge rise. Interwoven with the stench Smithback thought he caught, for a moment, the smell of wood smoke.
“Down?” he asked in disbelief, turning his face away. “Again? What, you mean slide in there on my belly?”
But his companion was already wriggling his way through.
“No way,” Smithback called out, squatting down near the hole. “Listen, I’m not going down there. If this Mephisto wants to talk, he has to come up here.”
There was a silence, and then Tail Gunner’s voice echoed out of the gloom on the far side of the cinder block. “Mephisto never comes higher than level three.”
“He’s gonna have to make an exception, then.” Smithback tried to sound more confident than he felt. He realized that he had put himself into an impossible situation, relying totally on this bizarre, unstable man. It was pitch black again, and he had no way of finding his way back.
There was a long silence.
“You still with me?” Smithback asked.
“Wait there,” the voice demanded suddenly.
“You’re leaving? Give me some matches,” Smithback pleaded. Something poked him in the knee and he cried out in surprise. It was Tail Gunner’s grimy hand, holding something out to him through the hole.
“Is that all?” Smithback asked, counting the three matches by touch.
“All I can spare,” came the voice, faint now and moving away. There were some more words, but Smithback could not make them out.
Silence descended. Smithback leaned back against the wall, afraid to sit down, clutching the matches tightly in one hand. He cursed himself for being foolish enough to follow the man down here. No story is worth this,he thought. Could he get back with only three matches? He shut his eyes and concentrated, trying to remember every twist and turn that had brought him here. Eventually, he gave up: the three matches would barely get him across those electrified rails.
When his knees began to protest he rose from the squatting position. He stared into the lightless tunnel, eyes wide, ears straining. It was so utterly black that he began to imagine things in the dark: movement, shapes. He remained still, trying to breathe calmly, as an infinity of time passed. This was insane. If only he—
“Scriblerian!” a ghostly, incorporeal voice sounded from the hole at his feet.
“What?” Smithback yelped, spinning around.
“I am addressing William Smithback, scriblerian, am I not?” The voice was cracked and low, a sinister sing-song rising from the depths beneath him.
“Yes, yes, I’m Smithback. Bill Smithback. Who are you?” he called, unsettled at speaking to this disembodied voice out of the darkness.
“Mephisto,”came the voice, drawing the sof the name into a fierce hiss.”
“What took you so long?” Smithback replied nervously, stooping down again toward the hole in the cinder block.
“It is a long way up.”
Smithback paused a minute, contemplating how this man—now standing somewhere below his feet—had needed to travel several levels upto reach this place. “Are you coming up?” he asked.
“No! You should feel honored, scriblerian. This is as close as I have been to the surface in five years.”
“Why is that?” Smithback asked, groping in the darkness for the microcassette recorder.
“Because this is my domain. I am lord of all you survey.”
“But I don’t see anything.”
A dry chuckle rose from the hole in the cinder block. “Wrong! You see blackness.And blackness is my domain. Above your head the trains rumble past, the surface dwellers scurry on their pointless errands. But the territory below Central Park—Route 666, the Ho Chi Minh trail, the Blockhouse—is mine.”
Smithback thought for a moment. The ironic place-name of Route 666 made sense. But the others confused him. “The Ho Chi Minh trail,” he echoed. “What’s that?”
“A community, like the rest,” hissed the voice. “Joined now with mine, for protection. Once upon a time, we knew the trail well. Many of us here fought in that cynical struggle against an innocent backward nation. And were ostracized for it. Now we live our lives down here in self-imposed exile, breathing, mating, dying. Our greatest wish is to be left alone.”
Smithback fingered the tape recorder again, hoping it was catching everything. He’d heard of the occasional vagrant retreating to subway tunnels for shelter, but an entire population… “So all your citizens are homeless people?” he asked.
There was a pause. “We do not like that word, scriblerian. We havea home, and were you not so timid, I could show it to you. We have everything we need. The pipes provide water for cooking and hygiene, the cables provide electricity. What few things we require from the surface, our runners supply. In the Blockhouse, we even have a nurse and a schoolteacher. Other underground spaces, like the West Side railyards, are untamed, dangerous. But here, we live in dignity.”