“There,” she says.
It’s a subway entrance.
Barred off. Metal grating across the opening, chains looped through the bars, a sign that says CLOSED in letters that have been peeling since before Sidney was born. The entrance is amouth in the sidewalk, wide stairs descending into absolute dark, and there are no lights inside. No sound. Nothing at all coming from within except a cold that Sidney can feel from the middle of the street, a chill so sharp and so total that his skin pebbles with goosebumps and his breath catches and every instinct he has says turn around.
It’s not just cold. It’s wrong. The wrongness registers in his body before his mind can name it, a deep animal dread that has nothing to do with temperature. A pull, insistent, downward, that says come closer and also says don’t, and the contradiction is the worst part, the feeling of being invited and repelled at the same time.
“He’s down there,” Penny says.
Of course he is.
Behind them, from the direction they came, the sound of movement. Heavy. Getting closer.
Sidney adjusts Penny’s weight. Ducks under the metal grating, turns sideways to fit through a gap in the bars. Steps onto the first stair.
The dark takes them.
It’s not ordinary dark. It’s not the absence of light that you get in a room with the curtains drawn or a street with the lamps out. This dark is a physical thing. It sits on his skin and crowds into his lungs with every breath, thick and cold, with a taste at the back of it like wet stone and old metal. He can’t see. He can’t see anything at all. He moves by feel, each step a controlled fall onto the next stair, one hand trailing the wall, the other gripping Penny’s ankle where it’s hooked around his hip.
Three stairs down, four, five, and he registers that the sounds from above have stopped. Whatever was following them didn’t follow them in. Something about this entrance stopped it. The bars, the dark, the wrongness, whatever lives at the boundarybetween the mortal world and whatever this is, it kept the thing out. Sidney takes that as a small mercy and keeps descending.
He counts stairs. He doesn’t know why. It gives him something to focus on besides the dark and the cold and the sound of his own breathing, which is too loud in this space, echoing off walls he can’t see.
“Have you been here before?” he asks, partly to break the silence and partly to confirm that the child on his back hasn’t been swallowed by the void.
He feels her nod against his shoulder. “Yeah. I stay here with my dad sometimes.”
“You should have come here first. You should have gone to your dad before you came to me.”
She shakes her head. “No. It’s too scary.”
Sidney considers the absolute, impenetrable darkness currently surrounding them on all sides and the sounds emanating from somewhere below that he can’t identify and doesn’t want to, a murmur, a low vibration that feels more like the tunnel itself breathing than any noise a thing could make, and he can’t argue with her assessment. It is scary. It’s the scariest place he’s ever been and he grew up in Haven, which has no shortage of scary places, and he is lying through his teeth when he tells her it’s fine.
“It’s not scary,” he says. “Look, you’ve got all these nice lights.”
There are no nice lights. There is a faint glow beginning to emerge from cracks in the walls, a sourceless illumination the color of a bruise, purple-green, barely enough to see by. It shows him the shape of the tunnel ahead, narrow and old, stone that sweats condensation, a floor that’s worn smooth by something that isn’t foot traffic.
“And it’s a cave,” he continues, because he’s committed now. “You can be a cave explorer. Go spelunking.”
“What’s spelunking?”
“Spelunking. It’s what cave explorers do. Finding new tunnels to crawl through, like a little monkey.”
A hesitation. Her grip on his neck shifts. “I don’t like monkeys.”
Sidney tries to think of something that crawls that a five-year-old might find acceptable. “Lizard?”
A nod. “Okay. I’ll be a lizard.”
They walk. The tunnel goes on longer than it should, curving and narrowing and then widening again, the light from the cracks pulsing in a slow rhythm that feels organic, like a heartbeat in the walls. The murmur gets louder. It resolves from a single low vibration into something layered, a thousand voices overlapping in a register too low for words, and Sidney realizes, with a certainty that settles into his stomach like a stone, that it’s the sound of souls. That’s what’s down here. That’s what this place is. A passage to the land of the dead, and the sound he’s hearing is every person who has ever died moving through the dark below his feet.
He holds Penny tighter and keeps walking.
They emerge.
The tunnel opens and the space expands and Sidney stops because he can’t not stop, because what he’s looking at is not something his brain was built to process. The underworld stretches in every direction, a vast, cavernous expanse that extends farther than he can see, and the ceiling, if there is a ceiling, is so high and so dark that it might as well be a sky. The primary source of light is the river. It cuts through the center of the space, wide and slow, and it glows, a deep, eerie green, the color of fresh moss, and the glow casts everything in a wash of pale emerald that makes the shadows deeper and the edges sharper.
The river is full of people.
