Century #4: Dragon of Seas (23 page)

“I’m not here for them.” Jacob Mahler raises his shiny metal bow. “I’m here for me.”

Then everything happens in a flash. Mahler perks up his ears and darts to the side as fast as a falcon. A knife whizzes right through the spot where his back was an instant ago, passes centimeters away from Heremit’s arm and flies out of the building, vanishing.

Heremit Devil falls to the ground. Jacob rolls over on the floor twice and leaps up.

Nik Knife is standing in the doorway.

And he isn’t alone.

“Put down the violin,” the knife thrower orders, holding Harvey in front of him, “and I will not cut his throat.”

Jacob Mahler slowly does as he says.

“Very good …” Nik Knife steps into the room. “Now let’s go call the girls, shall we?”

Jacob Mahler thinks,
Base jump
.

I
T
’
S IMPOSSIBLE TO MAKE OUT ANYTHING THROUGH THE LAKE
’
S
murky water. It’s like floating in grayness. You need to grope your way around.

A meter below the surface is the opening to a duct: a steel pipe just big enough to slip into. Once they’re inside of it, the gray water becomes black and they need to move quickly, pushing themselves forward with their hands and feet. There isn’t a current. It’s still, stagnant water.

It’s warm, the same tropical temperature as rainwater. Water that’s far from refreshing.

Sheng leads the way. Ermete follows close behind him. They move through the duct like two giant, awkward crabs, thrusting their feet against the inside of the pipe. In the dark.

You need to be really brave
, Sheng thinks,
to do something like this
.

You need to be insane
, Ermete thinks, trying not to think at all.

Because after the first thirty seconds in the darkness, the pipe narrows. While at first they could swim through it by moving their
hands and arms, now they need to tuck them against their sides and push themselves along with only their tiptoes.

The backpack is in front of them, in the lead, like a figurehead. Or like one of those battering rams they once used to knock down castle doors.

Right after the bottleneck, the pipe begins to descend, and as the descent sharpens, so does the feeling they’re falling into a trap. They can’t turn around and they can’t go back. They can only continue along in the darkness, hoping they have enough breath.

A minute has gone by.

And at that point, the pipe narrows a second time. Now the backpack is stuck and Sheng needs to push it through. For Ermete, who’s bringing up the rear, the slowdown is becoming terrible. Gripped with panic, he coughs.

Coughing, he inhales water.

Inhaling the water, he feels his panic rise. But he forces himself to calm down, because his head is throbbing and he knows his lungs are out of oxygen. Sheng has stopped, so he reaches out into the darkness, grabs what feels like Sheng’s foot and shoves it. His friend slips forward and Ermete tries to catch up with him. But he bangs into a metal wall. On all sides, there’s only metal. The duct has come to an end.

Ermete spins around like a screw and looks up. He sees a circle of gray light and in the circle he sees the shadow of a hand reaching down into the water.

The engineer grabs it.

And lets himself be pulled out.

* * *

Ermete sputters, coughing the water out of his lungs.

Beside him, Sheng is doubled over on his knees, exhausted.

The engineer rolls over on the ground, coughs a few more times and asks, “Where are we?”

“I don’t know,” Sheng answers, peering around. “It looks like a cave. But from what I know, there aren’t any caves here in Shanghai.…”

“We’re under the park,” Ermete murmurs, raising his arms to feel around for a ceiling. His hands brush against a smooth cement wall to the side of the pipe they just came out of. “This place is man-made.”

He takes a few uncertain steps, trying to figure out how big their surroundings are. The ground is covered with a few centimeters of flowing water. They hear cascades up ahead, in the darkness.

“It seems like some kind of maintenance tunnel,” he says.

“There are pipes in the ceiling,” Sheng adds, “and water’s coming out of them, up there!”

“How do you know that?”

“I can see them,” the boy answers. “Let me go first.”

They make their way along, single file, and reach the corner of the cement wall. Now there are at least ten centimeters of water on the ground. Once they turn the corner, even Ermete starts to make out a dim glow. A shaft of light. Or a low-voltage fluorescent tube forgotten by whoever built the place. Now he can also see the pipes Sheng mentioned.

Water outlets along the cement walls spew rainwater, which
pools together on the ground and flows over to the duct they came in through.

“It’s a rainwater reservoir that feeds into the lake,” Ermete realizes.

Sheng looks up. The passageway they’re walking through is at least four meters tall. “This place probably fills all the way up during the rainy season.”

“Oh, great! And when’s the rainy season?”

“Right now,” Sheng says in a quiet voice, wading through the water.

As they continue along in the only possible direction, the cement passageway grows chillier. And the water on the ground becomes freezing.

“Nothing better than a tropical cold,” Ermete grumbles, coughing. “Where are we going, anyway?”

“I don’t know, Ermete.”

“Don’t you have some imaginary friend you could ask?”

“Not funny.”

“You know what else isn’t funny? Walking down a rainwater drainpipe in the dark, and for no good reason.”

“You can go back, if you want.”

“Ooh, nice one! Did you go to the same stand-up comedy school as Harvey? Welcome to our planet: bitter youth.”

Ermete grumbles to himself for the next dozen steps.

Then he asks, “Now what?”

Sheng has halted in front of him.

“… what?… what?” a strange echo repeats.

“Don’t push,” Sheng whispers, letting Ermete see why he stopped.

“Oh, no!” the engineer exclaims.

“… no! … no!”

They’re on the edge of a large, round reservoir as wide as an Olympic swimming pool. The ceiling is twenty meters overhead, the grates of a dozen manholes positioned around it in a circle, like the hours on a clockface. The dim light is coming in through the manholes, along with streams of rainwater. On the reservoir’s gray cement walls are the openings of pipes in different sizes, marked with numbers written in black characters, and metal rings that look like they haven’t been touched for years. Water is flowing into the reservoir through the pipes’ dark mouths. Some of them only seep thin, yellowish sewage, while water spews copiously from others. The murky water in the reservoir below is rippling and churning from the constant intake coming from all directions.

The water is a few centimeters below the level in the passageway they just stepped out of.

“Man,” Ermete whispers. “Now how do we get out of here?”

“I’m not so sure we need to get out,” Sheng replies, looking around. He studies the ducts’ wide openings, the numbers, the crumbling gray cement, the strange iron rings, the manholes in the ceiling and finally the metal rungs of a ladder leading up on the opposite side of the reservoir.

“We need to go there!” he says, pointing at the wall.

“Up that ladder?”

“No.” Sheng points at a rather large opening next to it, half a meter above the surface of the water. It’s marked with a two-digit number. “We need to go through that duct.”

“Why that one?”

“Because it’s duct number eighty-nine,” Sheng answers, as if it was obvious.

“On my three!” Ermete shouts from the underground reservoir. Cupping Sheng’s right foot in his hands, he starts counting slowly. “One … two … three!”

He boosts his friend up, grunting from the effort. Sheng springs up, grabs hold of the lower rim of duct number 89 and hangs there.

Meanwhile, Ermete sinks down under the whirling water in the reservoir and quickly tries to resurface. By the time he does, Sheng has already hoisted himself into the duct and has turned around to reach out his hand.

Ermete grabs it.

“On three! One … two … three!”

Ermete jumps as high as he can and, at the same time, feels himself being pulled up. He grabs hold of the edge of the duct with his free hand and drags himself up.

Sheng turns around and leads the way.

Duct number 89 is around half a meter tall, just enough to crawl through. It slopes upward and is relatively dry. More than damp, it’s cold. Freezing cold.

After a few minutes of this slow advance, when the light from the manholes disappears, the two can finally stand up and start walking through the darkness again.

“It ends here,” Sheng says after a dozen or so meters.

Ermete bumps into him. “What do you mean, it ends here?” he asks.

“There’s a grate.”

“Open it.”

Clunk! Clunk! Clunk!

“It won’t open.”

“Let’s try it together. Make room.”

“Easier said than done.”

“Hand me the backpack.”

Sheng presses his back against the wall and tries to let Ermete through. In seconds, they’re stuck, the tips of their noses touching.

“Oh, would you—look at—this mess …,” the engineer grunts into Sheng’s face. Then he grabs the grate with both hands and shoves on it.

Beside him, Sheng does the same.

Clunk! Clunk! Clank!

“We’re doing it,” the engineer cheers when he hears the last noise. “C’mon!”

A few more shoves and the grate gives way, tumbling down on the other side with a deafening clatter.

Ermete is the first one to roll out. He ends up in a strange underground hall lit by a row of fluorescent lights high overhead. Sheng follows him in.

They’re sopping wet, dirty and grimy.

“First possibility,” Ermete observes, trying to make out their surroundings. “We’re in a giant’s freezer.”

“The second?”

“We’ve wandered onto a movie set at a studio that makes catastrophe movies. You know, Pompeii, the Trojan War.…”

They wander through the strange place, feeling like they’re in the middle of an archeological excavation site. Slowly but surely
as they proceed, they see metal walkways arranged at different heights over an old stone pavement, the remains of small walls and more massive walls that section the underground hall into smaller rooms, some crumbling pillars, and, in the back, a larger wall covered with thousands of blue mosaic tiles.

In front of it, the remains of two giant statues facing each other. Both of them appear human. The one on the left, which is better preserved, is a woman whose arm is stretched out in the act of giving a blessing. The other one, destroyed from the knees up, seems to have been a man. Between the two statues is a third carved figure, its strange, dark, hunched, spiral shape covered with scales.

The backpack slung over his shoulder, Sheng walks up to the strange collection of artifacts. Ermete follows him. On the surviving walls around them are the remains of large, strange masks that are similar to the gargoyles on Gothic churches but look far more ancient. Claws, beaks and monster faces leer down from a ceiling that has only partially withstood the test of time. In the uneven paving stones is a series of circular holes that look like little wells. Now that they’re closer, Sheng notices that the statue on the left really is a woman, her face covered by a veil.

“It can’t be …,” he whispers, holding back a wave of shivers.

The woman wears a long gown, a tunic covered with stylized depictions of all the world’s animals. What remains of her arm is raised in front of her.

“Isis …,” Ermete whispers beside him, dripping. “The goddess of Nature.”

The twin statue facing her has only one foot and a male leg carved into the rock.

“And my bet is that this one’s Mithra, who was born from stone.”

But both of them are left speechless when they look at the third statue, the one between the other two: seen from behind, it looks like a monster crouched over, ready to pounce.

“And this one?” Ermete asks.

“I think it’s … the Sea Dragon,” Sheng says, his eyes completely flooded with gold.