Given what I’d seen in Lace’s apartment, that wording was appropriate. “So let me guess: The guy who lived in 701 is gone.” So pretty I just had to eat him.

The man from Records nodded. “That’s right, 701. Jesus Delanzo, age twenty-seven. Photographer.” He looked up at me, and when I didn’t say anything, he continued, “Apartment 702 was occupied by Angela Dreyfus, age thirty-four. Broker.”

“Where does she live now?”

He frowned. “We don’t exactly have an address for her. Just a post office box in Brooklyn, and a cell phone that doesn’t answer.”

“Rather anonymous, don’t you think?” the Shrink said.

“And her friends and family don’t think it’s weird she lives in a post office box?” I asked.

“We don’t know,” the Records guy said. “If they’re worried, they haven’t filed with the NYPD.”

I frowned, but the Records guy kept going. “A couple lived in the other apartment—703. Patricia and Joseph Moore, both age twenty-eight. And guess what: Their mail forwards to the same post office box as Angela Dreyfus’s, and they have the same phone number.” He leaned back, crossed his legs, and smiled, rather pleased to have put such a juicy coincidence on my plate.

But his last words hadn’t even gotten through to me yet. Something else was really wrong.

“That’s only three apartments. What about 704?”

He raised an eyebrow, looked down at his printouts, and shrugged. “Unoccupied.”

“Unoccupied?” I turned to the Shrink. “But that’s where Morgan lived. Her junk mail is still showing up there.”

The Records guy nodded. “The post office doesn’t forward junk mail.”

“But why don’t you have a record of her?”

He leafed through his folder as he shook his head. “Because the landlord never filed an occupancy form for that apartment. Maybe they were letting her live there for free.”

“For free? Fat chance,” I said. “That’s a three-grand-a-month apartment.”

“Actually, more like thirty-five hundred,” the Records guy corrected.

“Ouch,” I said.

“The rent is not the most unsettling thing about that building, Cal,” the Shrink said. “There was something else Records didn’t notice until you prompted them to look.”

The guy glanced sheepishly down at his papers. “It’s not anything we usually flag for investigation. But it is … odd.” He shuffled papers and unrolled a large set of blueprints across his knees. “The building plans show an oversize foundation, much deeper and more elaborate than one would expect.”

“A foundation?” I said. “You mean, the part that’s underground?”

He nodded. “They didn’t have the air rights to put up a tall building, because it would block views of the river. So they decided to make some extra space below. There are several subbasements descending into the granite bedrock, spreading out wider than the building overhead. Room for a two-floor health club, supposedly.”

“Health club in the basement.” I shrugged. “Not surprising in a ritzy place like that.”

The Shrink drew herself up. “Unfortunately, this health club is not in a particularly healthy location. They excavated too close to the PATH tunnel, an area where the island is very … porous. That tunnel was only finished in 1908. Not everything stirred up by the intrusion has settled yet.”

“Not settled yet?” I said. “After a hundred years?”

The Shrink steepled her fingers. “The big things down there awaken slowly, Kid. And they settle slowly, too.”

I swallowed. Every old city in the world has a Night Watch of some kind, and they all get nervous when the citizens start digging. The asphalt is there for a very good reason—to put something solid between you and the things that live underneath.

“It’s possible that this excavation has opened the lower environs,” the Shrink said, “allowing something old to bubble up.”

“You think they uncovered a reservoir?”

Neither of them said anything.

Remember what I said about rats carrying the disease? How broods store the parasite in their blood when their peeps die? Those broods can last a long time after the peeps are gone, spreading the disease down generations of rats. Old cities carry the parasite in their bones, the way chicken pox can live in your spinal column for decades, ready to pop out as horrible blisters in old age.

“The health club, huh?” I said, shaking my head. “That’s what people get for working out.”

“It may be more than a reservoir, Cal. There may be larger things than rats and peeps to worry about.” The Shrink paused. “And then … there are the owners.”

“The owners?” I asked.

The man from Records glanced at the Shrink, and the Shrink looked at me.

“A first family,” she said.

“Oh, crap,” I answered. One thing about the carriers of the Night Watch: They have a special affection for the families after whom the oldest streets are named. Back in the 1600s, New Amsterdam was a small town, only a few thousand people, and everyone was someone’s cousin or uncle or indentured servant. Certain loyalties go back a long way, and in blood.

“Who are they? Boerums? Stuys?”

The Shrink’s eyes slitted as she spoke, one hand gesturing vaguely toward the half-forgotten world outside her town house. “If I remember correctly, Joseph once lived on this very street. And Aaron built his first home on Golden Hill, where Gold Street and Fulton now meet. Mercer Ryder’s farm was up north a ways—he grew wheat in a field off Verdant Lane, although that field is called Times Square these days. And they had more farmland in Brooklyn. They were good boys, the Ryders, and the Night Mayor has kept up with their descendants, I believe.”

I found my voice. “Ryder, you said?”

“With a y,” the Records guy offered softly.

I swallowed. “My progenitor’s name is Morgan Ryder.”

“Then we have a problem,” said the Shrink.

The guy from Records, whose name was Chip, took me down to his cubicle. We were going over the history of the Hoboken PATH tunnel, which was a lot more exciting than you’d think.

“The first incident was in 1880, killed twenty workers,” Chip said. “Then another in 1882 killed a few more than that. They were supposedly explosions, and the company had the body parts to prove it.”

“Handy,” I said.

“And leggy,” he chuckled. Out from under the soulless eyes of the Shrink’s doll collection, Chip was a certified laugh riot. “That brought the project to a halt for a couple of decades. Those incidents were in Jersey, but on this side of the river we never bought the cover story.”

“Why not?”

“There are ancient tunnels that travel through the bedrock, all around these parts. And around the PATH train, the tunnels are … newer.” His fingers drifted along the tunnel blueprints on his desk. “Check it out, Cal: If you add up the weight of all the plants and animals that live under the ground, it’s actually more than everything that lives above. About a billion organisms in every pinch of soil.”

“Yeah, none of which is big enough to eat twenty people.”

He lowered his voice. “But that’s what happens after you’re buried, Kid. Things in the ground eat you.”

Great, now Records was calling me Kid. “Okay, Chip,” I said. “But worms don’t eat people who are still alive.”

“But there’s a food chain down there,” he said. “Something has to be at the top.”

“You guys don’t have a clue, do you?”

Chip shook his head. “We have clues. Those tunnels? They’re a lot like the trails of an earthworm through the dirt.”

I frowned and dropped my eyes back to the blueprints for Lace’s building. The fine-lined drawings—precisely scaled and covered in tiny symbols—showed only the shapes that human machines had carved from the soil. No hint at the environment surrounding our descent into the earth. “So you think there are giant worms down there? I thought you guys in Records were a little more … factual.”