A rush of unnatural cold washed over me as I descended, like plunging feet first into a pool of Grey. I felt like Alice gone down a haunted rabbit hole. Quinton came down behind me, hanging onto the ledge for a moment as he pulled the grille back into place, and dropped to the floor of cracked and tilted concrete and compacted dirt.
Quinton brought out his flashlight and directed it at the ground, keeping the beam from reflecting into the glass of the window we’d entered through. I’d expected to land in a basement, but the space proved to be a gallery built of brick and rusting iron girders that held up part of the alley above. I looked around in the dim light and felt a little dizzy. Here below the street the world was in the unending grip of gelid fire and inhabited by ghosts, fairly writhing with the incorporeal mass of deceased humanity. Their phantom bodies flowed through and around us like chill water, making me shiver and gasp in their unexpected tide. Long dead men, horses, and dogs—even a mangy cat—still went about their business here while the roaring flames of the Great Fire consumed all and nothing.
Quinton’s beam spotlighted a more lively animal—a brown rat that scuttled into a deeper darkness with a squeak of outrage. Then the blinding light moved over my face and quickly back down to the ground.
“Are you all right? You look sick.”
“Just adjusting. The atmosphere’s a little… heavy here,” I panted, getting my equilibrium back.
Then I whispered to him, “Have you ever… seen any zombies… down here?”
He looked at me and blinked. Then he answered slowly. “If by zombie you mean ambulatory dead, then yes. I have.” He fell into a wary silence, as if he wasn’t sure what I was going to make of the answer.
“That sounds like a nutty question, doesn’t it?”
“From most people, I guess. From you, I think it means there’s something more going on. So, what is it?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know yet. Sandy—the woman I was talking to at the Union Gospel Mission—said she’d seen zombies and found body parts around Pioneer Square since the storms, and I had a… run-in with a zombie last night. A walking corpse, to be more precise. Just before I saw it, I saw a fox—just like Jay did and in the same area. Probably the same fox.”
“I thought that spooked you.”
I nodded. “Here was the strange thing—well, one of several strange things…” I felt myself frowning about that and shook it off.
“What strange things—stranger than zombies, that is?”
“This zombie was animated by its own spirit—or two spirits—which was trapped in the corpse by a—a kind of web.” I was having a little difficulty with a more precise description without going into ridiculous detail that wasn’t relevant. “Magic energy—one of those things I can see and touch. But the important point was that I found the same sort of material on the hole in the tunnel wall where you found Go-cart yesterday. I’ve never seen anything quite like it elsewhere, so I think it’s the same thing in both cases, which would imply a connection to a common source or cause between the dead man and the zombie. And Sandy’s talking about missing people and zombies made me wonder.”
Jay had moved farther down the buried alley and whispered back to us from the dark. “Up here. There’s people in here. They took Bear’s stuff.”
Quinton linked one of my arms with his free one and tugged me gently forward.
“C’mon. We’ll talk about this later.”
I nodded and took a deep breath before falling in beside him. Moving helped, but I was thinking as we went. If Go-cart was part of a pattern of death and disappearance, were the strands of soft, neutral Grey part of that pattern? If so, then the pattern would link him to the zombie I’d had thrust upon me the night before, and that man had been dead quite a while. Who was he before he became a walking, rotting prison for his soul, and who had been along for the ride? I shuddered and carried on beside Quinton through the unseen throng of burning ghosts.
We caught up to Blue Jay at an underground corner, where the alley met an old sunken sidewalk of rotted boards and disrupted cement. Down the sidewalk to our left there was a light and gathered around it were three people.
Jay pointed into the dark at the near corner and spoke in a raw whisper. “I found the blanket there a couple days ago. Bear’s hat was there, too, but it didn’t fit me, so I left it. Now it’s gone. You see the man with the braids? Tall Grass.”
“Did he take Bear’s hat?” Quinton asked.
“I don’t see it on him.”
“Do you see Lass or Tanker?”
“No. Just Tall Grass and his girlfriend and… looks like one of the People.”
I shot a questioning look at Quinton, who whispered back, “He means another Indian.” Quinton peeked around Jay’s shoulder and studied the group. “They look OK. Let’s go ask them what they’ve seen. If they’ve seen Bear or his stuff. Or Lass or Tanker.”
Jay dug in his heels. “I won’t go.”
“Why not?” Quinton asked.
“Moths. And that bird. There shouldn’t be birds down here. That’s bad.”
I backed up so I could lean against the other building corner and see down the sidewalk better. Through the fog of Grey shapes I spotted the more solid, moving flickers of large moths. They were acting strange for moths—staying away from the light in favor of fluttering around the heads of the people in the circle.
“I don’t see a bird,” I said.
Jay pointed into the shadow where the light began to fade away into darkness again. A gleam of something dark and shiny showed me the eye of a good-sized bird. As I concentrated on it the shape became more clear. It was a small crow—much smaller than the ones I’d seen at the tunnel mouth, but still a crow. It hopped and flapped its wings, flying farther into the shadows, and I knew this was screwy—birds don’t fly in the dark. The gleam of the light touched several more pairs of bird and rat eyes that blinked from the darkness.
“What is it with crows and moths?” I muttered.
“Moths carry messages from ghosts. Crows and ravens, they’re specially magical. Those guys are talking to ghosts. I don’t want nothing to do with ghosts. Bad, bad magic.” Jay began backing away, past Quinton and me. Then he turned and ran into the darkness in the opposite direction.
I didn’t like the feeling of being abandoned, but fleeing myself wouldn’t help.
There was something more than ordinarily eerie to the situation—perhaps it was the setting, though. The hidden sidewalk and its sun-deprived landscape populated by the shapes of memory and broken slabs of time over equally broken concrete had an otherworldly feel that encouraged an anticipation of something uncanny breaking through at any moment.
“Well,” I muttered to Quinton, “I talk to ghosts all the time. This doesn’t look too bad. You know any of them?”
Quinton pointed to each one, his voice edged in distaste as he spoke. “The woman is Jennifer Novoy—Jenny Nin. Small-time grunge rocker, got into drugs, fell out of the regular world and into this one. Whores for drugs, alcohol—you name it. Probably why Jenny’s down here with Tall Grass. He’s big-time trouble, small-time crook. Most of the shelters won’t let him in since he’s been caught stealing, dealing, and messing with the kids. Criminal record as Thomas Newman.
He’s from a local tribe—Nisqually—on his mother’s side and makes a big deal of it when it suits him to play the victim. He’s one of the most politically aware of the undergrounders, though he mostly uses it to his own ends.” His tone went neutral. “That other guy—Grandpa Dan—I don’t know much about him except he’s older than dirt and he seems to polarize the Indians around here—they love him or hate him.”
“How do you know some of this? Doesn’t sound like the kind of thing most people would tell.”
Quinton shrugged. “I do things. I get to know them, or I look into records. I snoop when I have to—I want to know who’s going to do what. Some of these guys I know better than their parents did. I wish I didn’t, to be honest.”