1. THE BOOK OF NIGHT WITH MOON
Chapter One
They never turn the lights off in Grand Central; and they may lock the doors between 1 and 5:30 a.m., but the place never quite becomes still. If you stand outside those brass-and-glass doors on Forty-second Street and peer in, down the ramp leading into the Grand Concourse, you can see the station’s quiet nightlife—a couple of transit police officers strolling past, easygoing but alert; someone from the night cleaning crew heading toward the information islandinthe center of the floor with a bucket and a lot of polishing cloths for all that century-old brass. Faintly, the sound of rumblings under the ground will come to you—the Metro-North trains being moved through the upper-and lower-level loops, repositioned for their starts in the morning, or tucked over by the far-side tracks to be checked by the night maintenance crews. On the hour, the massive deep gong of the giant Accurist clock facing Forty-second strikes, and the echoes chase themselves around under the great blue sky-vault and slowly fade.
By five o’clock the previous day’s dust will have been laid, the locks checked, the glass on the stores in the Graybar and Hyatt passageways all cleaned: everything done, until it’s time to open again. The transit policemen, still in a pair because after all this is New York and you just can’t tell,will stroll past, heading up the stairs on the Vanderbilt Avenue side to sit down in the ticketed passenger waiting area and have their lunch break before the day officially starts. Anyone looking in through the still-locked Forty-second Street doors will see nothing but stillness, the shine of slick stone and bright brass.
But there are those for whom locked doors are no barrier. Were you one of them, this morning, you would slip sideways and through, padding gently down the incline toward the terrazzo flooring of the concourse. The place would smell green, the peculiar too-strong wintergreen smell of a commercial sweeping compound. Your nose would wrinkle as you passed a spot on the left, against the cream-colored wall, where blood was spilled yesterday—a disagreement, a knife and a gun pulled, everything finished in a matter of seconds: one life wounded, one life fled, the bodies taken away. But the disinfectants and the sweeping compound can’t hide the truth from you and the stone.
You would walk on, pause in the center of the room, and look upward, as many tunes before, at the starry, painted vault of the heavens—its dusk-blue rather faded, and half the bulbs in the Zodiac’s constellations burnt out. TheZodiacis backward. They’ll be renovating the ceiling this spring, but you doubt they’ll fixthatproblem. It doesn’t matter, anyway: after all, “backward” depends on which direction you’re looking from…
You would walk on again then, guided by senses other than the purely physical ones, and stroll silently over to the right of the motionless up-escalators, toward the gate to Track 25. Once through its archway, everything changes. The ambiance of the terminal—light, air, openness— abruptly shifts: the ceiling lowers, the darkness closes in. Lighting comes in the form of long lines of fluorescent fixtures, only one out of every three of them lit, this time of day. They shine down in bright dashed lines on the seven platforms to your right, the nine to your left, and straight ahead, on the gray concrete of the platform that serves Tracks 25 and 26. Behind you, a pool of warm light lies under the windows of the glass-walled room that is the Trainmaster’s Office. Little light, though, makes it past the platform’s edge to the tracks themselves. They are long trenches of shadow between pale gray plateaus of concrete that stretch, tapering, into the middle distance, vanishing into more darkness. The rails themselves gleam faintly only close to where you stand: they too reach off into the dark, converging, and swiftly disappear. Red and green track guidelights shine dully there. A few shine brighter: the track crew members are down there, walking the rails to check for obstructions and wiping the lights off as they come.
You walk quietly down the center platform, letting your eyes get used to the reduced light, until you come to where the platform ends, almost a quarter-mile from the arches of the gates.
You jump down from the tapered end of the platform, into shadow, and walk out of reach of the last fluorescent lights. The red and green lights marking the track switches are your only illumination now, and all you need. Seventy-five feet ahead of you, Tracks 25 and 26 converge. Just off to your right is the walkway to a low concrete building, Tower A, the master signaling center for the terminal. You are careful not to look directly at it: the bright lights inside it, the blinking of switch indicators and computer telltales, would ruin your night-sight. You pad softly on past, under its windows, past the little phone-exchange box at the tower’s end, on into the darkness. The still, close air smells of iron, rust, garbage, mildew, cinders, electricity—and something else.
Here you pause, warned by the senses that drew you here, and you wait. Trembling on your skin, and against your eyes, is a feeling like the tremor of air in the subway when, well down (he tunnel, a train is coming. But what’s coming isn’t a train. Everything around is silent, even the subway tunnel three levels below you. Two levels above you now is the block between Forty-ninth and Fiftieth Streets: from there, no sound conies, either. Watching, you wait.
No eyes but yours, acclimated and looking in the right place, would see what slowly becomes visible. The air itself, somehow more dark than the air in front of it, is bending, showing contour, like a plate-glass window bowing outward in a hurricane wind—or inward, toward you. Yet the contour that you half-see, half-sense, is wrong. It bulges like a blown bubble—but a bubble blownbackward,drawn in rather than pushed out. You half-expect to hear breath sucked inward to match what you almost-see.
The bubble gets bigger and bigger, spanning the tracks. The darkness in the air streaks, pulled past its tolerances. Not-light shows through the thin places; wincing, you glance away. The faintest possible shrilling sound fills your twitching ears, the sound of spacetime yielding to intolerable pressure, under protest: it scales up and up, piercing you like pins—
—and stops, as the bubble breaks, letting through whatever has been leaning on it from the other side. You look at it, blinking. Silence again: darkness.A false alarm—
Until, as you shake your head again at the shrilling, you realize that you shouldn’t still be hearing it. And out of the blackness in front of you, pattering, rustling, they come. First, just a few. Then ten of them, a hundred of them, more. Hurrying, scattering, humpily running, their little wicked eyes gleaming dull red in the light from far behind you, they flow at you likedarkness come alive, darkness with teeth, darkness shrilling with hunger: the rats.
There is more than hunger in those voices, though, more than just malice in those eyes. Their screams have terror in them. They will destroy anything that gets between them and their flight from what comes behind them, driving them; they’ll strip the flesh from your bones and never even stop to enjoy it. Backing away, hissing, you see the huge dark shape that comes behind them—walking two-legged, claws like knives lashing out in amusement at the shrieking tats, the long lashing tail balancing out behind: high above, the blunt and massive head, jaws working compulsively, huge razory fangs gleaming even in this dim light: and gazing down at you through the darkness, the eyes—the small, gemlike, cruelly smiling eyes, with your death in them:everything’sdeath.
Seeing this, you do the only thing you can. Yourun.
But it’s not enough… *
She was sound asleep when the voice breathed in her ear. There was nothing unusual about that: They always took the method of least resistance.
Oh,fwau,why right this minute?
Rhiow refused to hurry about opening her eyes, but rolled over and stretched first, a good long stretch, and yawned hard. Opening her eyes at last, she saw the main room still dark: herehhifhadn’t come out to open the window-coverings yet. No surprise there, for the noisemaker by the bed hadn’t gone off yet, either. Rhiow rolled over and stretched one more time, for the call hadn’t been desperately urgent, though urgent enough.Please don’t let it be the northside gate again. Not after all the hours we spent on the miserable thing yesterday.Au,it’s going to take forever to get things going this morning…