“What’s that?” asked Nippen.
“A trash can,” said Garvey, picking it up.
“A trash can?”
“Yeah. And it’s been beat to hell. Is it normal to find a trash can here?”
“On the rails, no. Maybe in the maintenance tunnels or one of the shafts. But not on the rails.” Nippen scratched his chin, leaving a twist of grease below his lip like a goatee. “Not unless someone threw it out the window or something.”
“Hm,” said Garvey. He tucked it under his arm and continued walking up the rails.
“That evidence?” said Nippen.
“Maybe,” said Garvey. “What’s the strangest thing that’s happened in the tunnels?”
“Oh, hell, I don’t know,” he said. “There’s plenty of stuff me and my colleagues have done that was strange enough.” He laughed hoarsely. “But I hear stories. Real stories. About things Kulahee made and they just stuffed down here, stuff they didn’t want to use or think about.” He stopped smiling. “Once I heard there was a maintenance crew sweeping through here and they heard someone. Someone coming out of the McNaughton tunnels. And they followed the sound, listening to the footsteps. And then they saw him. It was a man, but all white.”
“White?”
“Yeah. Like you or me, but totally drained of color. Like it had just been sucked out of him. Even his clothes were white. He turned around and looked at them, his eyes pink as a grapefruit. He’d been picking up cans that had settled in the tunnels. He just looked at them for a while, then he turned around and wandered on, deeper in. They didn’t follow. I wouldn’t have either.”
He and Garvey walked on for a stretch longer, not speaking. “Still,” said Nippen, “they’re just stories.”
They kept moving, Garvey examining every maintenance hatch or sewage pipe. They still had not seen a sign of the platform yet. Garvey was surprised. The trolley had taken only four minutes to go from one to the other. It must have been moving at a tremendous speed.
Suddenly he stopped by one maintenance tunnel, then tilted his head, listening.
“What?” said Nippen, but Garvey held up a hand to shush him. Garvey unlocked the hatch, then drew his gun. He nodded at Nippen to step back, then flung the hatch open. The maintenance tunnel was low and poorly lit, but they could still catch a flurry of movement as someone scrambled down another passageway. “Stop!” Garvey shouted, and bolted after them with his gun drawn and the trash can still under his arm.
He swung around the corner, finger not on the trigger but ready to get there, and stopped. A ragged man was sitting on the floor of a small closet before him, trying to pile scraps of paper and refuse over him in an attempt to hide. His face was covered in sores and his hands were no more than bandage-wrapped claws. He kept his face averted and would not look at Garvey.
Garvey lowered his gun. “Shit,” he said. “Who are you? What are you doing here?”
The man shook his head.
“I said, what are you doing here?”
“Ain’t nothing doing,” mumbled the man. “Ain’t nothing worth doing.”
“Oh, Christ,” sighed Garvey, and reholstered his gun. “Nippen!”
Nippen came running up the passageway, breathing heavily. When he swung around and saw the vagrant, he said, “Oh, no. Morty! Morty, guy, you’re not supposed to be here!”
“Morty?” said Garvey.
“Yeah, he’s a regular down here. He sneaks down into the maintenance tunnels all the time. We keep telling him to stay out, but he always manages to get in somehow. Morty, come on.” He squatted before the vagrant. “You know you can’t be here.”
“Ain’t nothing worth doing,” said Morty again. “Ain’t nothing worth doing in the whole wide world.” He kept uselessly shuffling through the papers with his bandaged hands.
“Here,” said Nippen, taking his arm. “Come on, Morty, get up.”
“Hold on,” said Garvey. He took out his notebook. “You’ve been in the tunnels? Have you been in here all day?”
Morty would not answer, still looking away.
“Were you, Morty?” asked Nippen.
Morty nodded reluctantly.
“Did you see anything?” Garvey asked. “Hear anything?”
“Hear all kinds of things,” said Morty.
“Like what?”
“Like trains. And pipes. And machines in the walls. Machines that speak to each other with light. Winking at each other. Blinking songs to one another. And crying. Always crying.”
“Crying?”
“Yuh,” said Morty, nodding. “Everything real unhappy down here. Crying.”
“All right,” said Garvey slowly, waiting.
“And everything sand,” added Morty.
“What?”
“Everything sand. Minutes. Seconds. Tears. Yesterday.”
“Everything’s sand?”
He nodded. “We come in. Stumble about. Holding bit of sand to our chest,” he said. One bandage-wrapped hand formed a cup against his breast. “Fall through our fingers all the time, all the time. We don’t even know. We don’t even know. We all dying and we don’t even know. But ain’t nothing last. Ain’t nothing last forever.” Then he peered up into Garvey’s face and said, “Watchman. The watchman way down low, down below the city, he coming. He got his hand clutched on things, too. Not sand. Seeds.” He leaned forward. “You know what they are?”
“No.”
“They’re tomorrow. More seconds. More futures. He giving them to us. He coming for us. He tries to tell us but we don’t listen. We can’t.”
“So you didn’t see anything?” said Garvey. He flipped his notebook shut.
Morty began rocking back and forth, shaking his head.
“Nothing at all?”
Morty stopped rocking and stared at him. “There are islands down here.”
“Islands?”
“Yeah. I’ve seen them. Islands, lost in the dark. Islands and buildings made of metal, floating around. All abandoned, lost in the dark in between the walls. They speak to each other. Speak to each other as they float. Flick lights on at each other. I hear it, the lights in my head. But sometimes the watchman makes them say other things.”
“Does he?”
“Yeah.”
“What does he make them say?”
Morty shook his head. He clasped his knees together and began rocking back and forth again.
“What does he say, Morty?” asked Nippen.
Morty said, “I am a messenger, sent from afar. You must listen to me. You must listen.”
“I’m listening.”
“I am a messenger, sent from afar. You must listen to me. You must listen.”
“Jesus,” said Garvey. He turned around and began to walk away.
“Sorry,” said Nippen after him. “He gets like this.”
“I am a messenger, sent from afar. You must listen to me. I am a messenger. I am a messenger. I am…”
Garvey hopped back into the trolley tunnel and smoked a cigarette as he waited. Another guttering moan rolled through the tunnels, tapering off into the sound of distant thudding, which soon faded. He wondered what it was. Perhaps the whole city had shifted above, one block moving centimeters over, almost tectonically. He found it hard to believe he could climb a nearby rung and find the normal world still there. The city and this winding, nocturnal labyrinth could not possibly exist together, separated only by a few feet of stone.
Nippen eventually climbed out, then picked up the earpiece set in the wall and bellowed into the tube, “Hey, Charlie? Charlie? It’s Jeff here. Listen, Morty’s in maintenance tunnel”-he stopped to check-“AC-1983 again. Yeah, yeah, I know. He almost got shot by a detective just now. No, you don’t, there be a lot of paperwork if we had to get rid of a goddamn body. Yeah. Yeah. Have a good one.” He hung up and returned to Garvey. “Sorry, again,” he said. “Morty’s like that. He comes down here to listen to all the noises. He thinks he hears voices in them.”
“Really,” said Garvey.
“Yeah. But he’s harmless. Just your average street crazy.”
They began walking down the trolley tunnel again, still waving the torches over the walls and the rails. Soon they saw a string of small, pearly lights far down along the tunnel wall, unmoving. It was disturbing, like seeing only one star in a black night sky.