The Witch of the Wood (26 page)

Right . . .

Sullivan was a football coach, built like a brick shithouse, using the super-gym at his disposal through the school to model the advantages of sheer and brute muscle mass to his players. Even injured, he was the favorite in this little “cage match” to come.

Rudy advanced to the lip of the hole and peered over. There was a rusted stepladder bolted into the wall and the chute was cylindrical. There was the sound of running water and a foul smell akin to swampland, black gutters, and waste.

It was not entirely dark.

There was a light flickering and wavering down in the recesses, and it didn’t take long to connect that with the fact that Sullivan had not been in possession of a torch during his retreat from the campsite. He’d been down the storm drain earlier, prepping it. Advantage bad guy.

Rudy bent, took hold of the ladder, and turned ass-backward.

Slowly, he climbed down into the hole.

***

The curved block walls were slick with old moisture, dank with mold and networks of stains from nitrates and phosphorus accumulations that webbed their way down the ceiling of the shaft. It gave a distinct skeletal illusion, as if Rudy were trapped inside some ancient, malignant beast. Every one of his steps was trailed by a hollow echo, and there was background dripping. The cylindrical tunnel was fifteen feet high and was riddled with cracks filled with moss and sediment directly across from the entrance point. There were torches jammed into the shattered light boxes every thirty feet or so, burning steadily, leaving black arcs on the damp cement behind them and simultaneously reflecting down their sickly flames in the sludge staining the tunnel’s base in a wide, brownish runner. Rudy was no mechanical engineer, but it was clear that this drainage system was a combination of storm run-off and sewage. Somewhere, this nasty stream was siphoned off into the river, probably the Schuylkill, and if circumstances had been different, Rudy would have considered sending a letter to his congressman about it. Thick patches of rotten leaves blocked the dirty flow in places, making it churn up and re-route, and horizontal ghost-lines along the sides indicated that during flooding this place filled near to the one-third mark. Rudy walked first on the right side, then hopped across to the left for haste, letting his momentum bring him forward. The fact that he had no shadow leading him on was a comfort, but his shoes were louder than cannons down here. His glasses steamed up, and he withdrew his mask and hood, almost laughing to himself that he’d sort of forgotten they were there.

At a juncture, he made a right and then halted.

There at the far end of the tunnel was Sullivan, straddling the murky runnel at his feet as was Rudy. The eye band had been removed, and there was a crater there tailed by a recently dried scrape that ran up the side of his head, then curling back down like a ram’s horn. He didn’t have long hair, but what was there was matted and curled. His five-o’clock shadow had turned to heavy black stubble, and his teeth glistened from within it in a crooked smear.

“Professor . . .” he sing-songed.

Rudy shivered. There was something about being addressed directly by this individual that was unnerving, like a wife-beater faking some “sincere” plea for women’s rights and looking at you with that reddened edge in his eye, ready to thrash you within an inch of your life if you admitted you didn’t believe him. And Sullivan was taller than he’d seemed on television. Where was that pair of scissors Rudy had brought with him to the battle? Did he drop them back by the lean-to? What if Sullivan was armed? Rudy would have been if he was Sullivan, that was for sure.

“Why didn’t you ambush me?” Rudy said, motioning back with a jerk of his head. “At the juncture there’s a concrete edge to hide behind. Seems like something you’d be good at.”

Sullivan laughed, and for the big man that he was it was high and sheer and razored, cascading off the curved array of wet polished block like a siren.

“Ambush?” the man said finally. “As in an attack? Like fisticuffs? Like a little barroom brawl down here in the pipes?” He stopped grinning and his eye gleamed out from his dark face. “We aren’t down here to fight, Dog-Boy. If you live, you live . . . all the power to you and bless your sweet soul. For me, I wouldn’t dirty my hands with you, but before any of the fun stuff begins we’re meant to know each other. Form boundaries, just in case this winds up being one of those . . . prolonged sort of disputes.”

Rudy stepped forward two paces and straddled the sewage water.

“No boundaries for a child molester, Sullivan. I’d die before drawing any lines in the sand with the likes of you.”

“Really,” he said. “I hope you’re willing to stand by those words. They’d write books about them, different from the old ones.”

“What books?”

“Biblical ones, of course. The ones you already have yourself starring in, hmm?”

Sullivan had lowered his voice to that soft, condescending, nearly effeminate tone so often utilized by those careful pricks in Human Resources who were going to nail you to the wall for some minor infraction that was going to go on your record. It bothered Rudy immeasurably.

“What are you talking about?” he said. He was really judging the distance between them, estimating how much momentum he could build in a straight rush. Sullivan took a step closer himself.

“For every action, there’s a reaction, Professor. When the zombie-girls came up, someone had to go under.” He pointed with the lame hand, its pinkie finger broken and crooked. “You’re the king of those dogs, but as subjects . . . as infantry, they’re of no use to you here in the sewers, Professor, even if they could climb down the ladders. They’re too clumsy, too big-boned and slow, don’t you see? In the new world, you’ve got to think about mastering the smaller, unnoticed parts of the earth, you’ve got to learn the cracks and crevices, understand the secrets of the dark, at least if you’re going to make your way down into the bowels where I’m the one you’ll have to answer to.”

Sullivan smiled. Allowed himself a giggle, and right on cue something came up from behind his head. Rudy thought his eyes were playing tricks on him, for it looked like a shadow at first, then a curious black cat with its paws clinging for purchase in Sullivan’s hair, crawling up and over his crown, then sliding around behind his ear, along the shoulder and up under his jaw, mewing, nuzzling.

Sullivan reached and grabbed the animal by the scruff of the neck and gently pulled it off, pronged paws dangling in little curves, the long gray tail coming to hang down like the back half of a garden snake.

It was a sewer rat ten pounds at the least, and Sullivan positioned his forearm to cradle it lovingly. Its paws played at the air, and he scratched its bald belly, bending to Eskimo kiss its sniveling nostrils, the top of its black muzzle oscillating rapidly up and down to expose two crooked front teeth that Sullivan took a second to flicker the tip of his tongue across.

“That’s my girl,” he said. He looked up at Rudy with a sheepish shrug that said,
Can’t help it, Jack. I just love her,
and then he positioned his bottom lip into a widened clown’s grin. He whistled shrilly.

There was a terrific clicking and tacking from the depths of the darkened tunnel behind, and then came the pouring out from around his feet as the army of rats flooded the space, skittering and yipping, jumping and scratching over one another in a bristling plague. In the swarm there were pups the size of fieldmice and others big as terriers, all filling the concrete tunnel in a spreading storm on both sides of the sludge. Rudy turned to run, and Sullivan’s voice rang out behind him,

“The Dog King retreats from the land of the Rat God. Put that in a book, why don’t ya? Sic ’em, boys! Don’t leave anything behind but the bones if you catch him!”

Professor Rudy Barnes sprinted back in the direction he had come, feet clapping along the dank cement, thighs pistoning furiously, arms pumping, neck straining forward. At the juncture he slipped making the half-turn and skidded against the far wall, almost breaking his elbow. Somehow he retained his balance, but he had to restart, feeling as if he were in one of those old Warner Brothers cartoons where the feet spun in place momentarily to the wacky percussion soundtrack. He willed himself forward to full speed again, stamping along the right of the murky runner for five steps or so, then jumping over to the left for the same. From around the corner behind him he heard the pack gaining, thousands of paw-nails clicking as if the entire population of Lilliput had been given tiny tap-dancing shoes and were emptied into some massive orchestra pit to charge through. With the echo it sounded like some sick sort of applause. Rudy heard splashes and sloshing and angry squeals. Nope. It ain’t faster in the pond, kids. Better to stick to the gunwales.

Suddenly he was disoriented. The exit ladder should have been straight up ahead about forty feet stage-right, bolted to the block wall about a yard from ground surface. On the high side of the tunnel he saw a porthole in the curve leading to the outside with a faded wash of moonlight funneling through it, but now there was nothing below but shadowy grime-blackened walls leading down the recess where the tunnel dead-ended in a concrete half-moon, acting like a catch-basin for a channel at a higher level.

Rudy hadn’t come from that far. There had been no graded concrete apron to jump down from. Of course, he hadn’t looked back over his shoulder down to the right upon entering in the first place. He had followed the torches to the left, so no, he couldn’t be absolutely positive that this blockade had been at his rear when he’d first made his way down the tunnel. In running from the rats just now, had he ducked back down the wrong exit shaft?

He shotgunned his legs forward, looking at all the context clues. There was the torch jammed into the light fixture box and the spidery cracks underneath with moss growing out of them: check, this was the place.

He ran forward with everything he had, dropping the gauze mask and regripping the groundcloth haphazardly.

The key word here was “shadowy.” There were no more shadows. Grime yes, but the walls just weren’t that blackened from it. There was something else here, something covering the cement.

Rudy ran for the torch and grabbed it out of its holder, next jumping back across the stream, aiming for the darkest area along the far wall beneath the high opening. Just before impact, he pulled over the groundcloth like a blanket in a house fire and lowered a shoulder.

He banged straight into the right side of the camouflaged ladder, feeling simultaneous and dichotomous sensations: a give and burst as if he’d body-checked a host of leather-lined water balloons, and the hard resistance of the cold steel beneath. It was a bone-shivering jolt that rocked him back a step and detonated a terrible flapping that exploded in front of him and down the shaft; a thick cloud of them all around outside of his makeshift hood, the torch buying him what sounded and felt like a cushion of about a foot and a half.

It wasn’t rats, but their winged brothers, beating the air with their membraned forelimbs and shrieking.

Rudy reached out blindly with the hand holding the canvas to catch a rung, and the groundcloth drew up his back, exposing him. He dropped the canvas altogether, turned a shoulder, and waved the torch out behind him.

The cloud pulled back, and the cement at his feet darkened with the torrent of oncoming rats. He turned and climbed, torch still in hand, things jumping at him, three or four rodents clinging to his pants cuffs and wriggling, bats darting in within an inch of his head and retreating. Barely. He moaned, kicked, and shook out his feet, waved and tomahawk-chopped the wand that was quickly losing its magic. He swept it back and forth, making short “whup-whup” sounds against the close air, and then gave it a last-ditch toss back into the fray. He only had four rungs to go, and he vaulted them two at a time, pulling with everything he had.

He scrambled out of the opening, and the black cloud vomited hard out of the drain-chute behind him. He rolled off atop the crushed stone, loving the keen air. There may have been a bat or two stuck to him, but he didn’t think so. One or two might have bitten or scratched him, but he didn’t feel any pain, only the wide openness of the night and the ground beneath him. Above him, the sky was blotted with the shapes of those Halloween circus tent wings, at first marking the night in a random fluttering squall, and next taking form in a widened arrowhead, the mass making downward swoops across the landscape and dizzying rises up at the moon.

The flock made two passes over the meadow and then returned in a massive plunge, forming a flickering cyclone whose funnel-mouth hissed within inches of Rudy’s nose. He was in the process of putting his arms in front of his face, but there was no need. They promptly shot back down the storm drain. It gave the illusion that they were actually being sucked down, like a video recording of an active volcano played on super-fast rewind. Rudy could only guess that they’d expected the outside world to be laden with landing pads, weigh stations, safe havens, trees. No more, and the rearranged outdoor furniture had distracted them from their goal of mauling the intruder. He got to his feet and brushed off, raising his arms, looking for tears in the cloth, bite marks, anything.

He seemed to be all right.

But there was something coming, there at the edge of audibility.

It was a whispering, brushing sound gaining body and purpose. Closing. Rudy looked at the opening he’d just come from. Could rats climb ladders? He knew these kinds of rodents could walk along thin rails, squeeze into tiny holes, slip through cracks less than a quarter their size. They didn’t have bones, wasn’t that right? Or was that a myth? But either way they couldn’t scale wet concrete at a ninety-degree angle, now could they?

Maybe not, but they could certainly find alternative exits. They weren’t coming from the storm drain. They were advancing through the grass from a ways behind it. Rudy made for the dirt leading up to the guardrail, legs feeling like lead. Halfway there, he awarded himself one last look over the shoulder.