The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures (22 page)

“— Was the existence of
a
second
piece of parchment, this one suggesting an alternative route.”

Jack points at the
notepaper as he gets up to bring more beers. “And that’s it?”

Fortesque nods. “It’s
not the actual parchment, as you can see, but it
is
the same
information, yes.”

“And where is it, this
second entrance?” Edgar asks, his tone suggesting that he isn’t buying any of
this.

Fortesque and Greenblat
exchange glances and then face forward. “The corner of 23rd and Fifth Avenue,
Manhattan,” Greenblat whispers, grinning.

“Right over there,”
Fortesque adds, pointing to where Jack Fedogan is standing behind the counter. “So,
getting back to my original question, do you have a back room?”

Jack starts Brubeck off
again on the PA and the drinks are set out on the bar counter.

This kind of situation
is not uncommon in The Land at the End of the Working Day, as you’ll know if
you been here with me before. It’s like the world knows when all the players
needed are already assembled and there’s no call for any more to come up on to
the stage.

Outside, on the evening
streets of Manhattan, the wind blows across the park and buffets the buildings,
blowing down the avenues and across the streets, searching out points of
weakness. Inside, Jack Fedogan leads his unlikely quintet across the floor and
behind the well-stocked bar.

He’s closed the front
door and turned the sign but he’s well-versed in the ways of the Working Day
and believes that everyone who needs to be here is here already. Furthermore, a
small voice would tell him if he stopped to pose the question, if there
were
someone else to come then he wouldn’t have been able to close the door. It’s
probably as well that Jack doesn’t pose that question because that answer would
almost certainly prove to be a little disconcerting.

“You know,” Edgar says
as he follows Jack under the raised wooden, counter-section, “all these years
and I’ve never been behind here?”

“Why would you be?” is
what Jack comes back with to that and it’s a reasonable response.

“He just doesn’t like to
feel he’s missing out,” Jim says, his smile tugging at the words and bending
them out of shape.

Jim is following on
behind Horatio Fortesque while, behind him, Meredith Lidenbrook Greenblat is on
Jim’s heels with Cliff Rhodes bringing up the rear.

To the strains of
Brubeck’s Mexican-sounding piano on “La Paloma Azul” they drift, a Manhattan
Wild Bunch walking in silence. Past the arrays of bottles and glasses, past
Jack’s collection of polishing cloths down almost to the end of the bar where
Jack pauses at a closed door on his left.

“I still think you’re
wrong on this,” Jack says, turning to face the others as he takes a hold of the
door handle. Behind him, at the end of the bar, an open door leads the way to
Jack’s office, a small kitchen and his private restroom.

“Out of his tree, he is,”
Edgar adds, also turning.

“We’ll see,” is all that
Fortesque has to say on the subject.

Jack pushes the door
open on to a narrow corridor, littered along its length with crates and cartons
of bottles and cans stacked two, three and sometimes even four high. As the
corridor moves further from the bar, the stacks become higher and,
occasionally, wider, the light dimming all the way . . . and, Jim Leafman is
sure, it seems to go downwards.

“Down
there?”
Jim
asks as he stares into the dimly-lit corridor. “Jack, you can hardly see your
hand in front of your face.” And just to prove it; Jim steps over the
threshold, raises his hand and looks at it, disappointed to discover that he
can see it perfectly clearly.

“Never use it,” Jack
says, neither proudly nor despondently. It’s just a statement of fact as far as
he’s concerned.

Fortesque and Greenblat
reach the doorway and they look inside.

“What do you think?” Greenblat whispers croakily.

“Well, according to
Snorro Turleson, it’s in here,” Fortesque says. He reaches into his pocket and
withdraws an elaborate-looking compass which he jiggles from side to side,
occasionally tapping the case.

“What the hell was here
in the twelfth century?” Cliff Rhodes asks nobody in particular as he leans
into the corridor and then, almost immediately, back out again.

Jack shrugs. “Indians?”

“What I mean is,” Cliff
continues, “is what was a man from Iceland doing down here in the US?”

Meredith Greenblat says,
“Well, many of the supposedly indigenous human species — Indians, if you will —
can be traced back to having come down from the Arctic circle and through
Canada to settle here in what was to become the United States. Perhaps —” He
raises his eyebrows and jiggles his head from side to side,” — perhaps Turleson
himself visited the area back when it was just a wilderness.” He shrugs. “Who
knows.”

“May we go in?”
Fortesque inquires.

Jack waves a hand
magisterially. “Go right ahead.” Fortesque starts into the corridor closely
followed by Greenblat.

“I must say,” Fortesque’s
voice echoes back to the others, “it certainly is dark along here.”

“You got a flashlight
you can give them, Jack?” Edgar says. “The sooner we show this idea to be a
looney tune the better.”

“Jack, did it ever occur
to you that your corridor wasn’t the usual kind of corridor you’d expect to
find in a Manhattan premises?”

Jack shakes his head to
Cliff and then looks down at the rapidly dwindling figures. “And I don’t know
why,” he says. “I guess it is a little strange to have so long a corridor.”

“So long a corridor!”
Edgar says, “it looks like it goes up into the next state. You reached the end
yet?” he shouts into the gloom.

“It’s getting warmer,”
comes back in Fortesque’s curious amalgam of accents.

“Hey,” says Jim
excitedly.

“Don’t get too excited,” Jack says. “They’re probably under the
kitchens of the Chinese restaurant two up the street.” “Oh,” Jim says, his
voice dripping with disappointment. “There’s some kind of markings here,”
Greenblat shouts. “The mark of Snorro!” says Cliff Rhodes, who immediately
grimaces an apology to a pained-looking Edgar.

The two figures turn a
bend about fifty yards distant, and Jim says, “You never checked it out, Jack?”

“Didn’t need to. I just
stacked boxes in there.  Never used it for anything else,” Jack says. As
Greenblat, following his companion, disappears from sight, he adds, “I’d better
get that flashlight.”

Jack retraces his steps
and, just for a few seconds, Dave Brubeck’s version of Hoagy Carmichael’s “Stardust”
waft through from the bar on a gentle cool breeze. And then again, a minute
later, when Jack reappears carrying a long flashlight which he immediately
turns on.

“You okay down there?” Edgar shouts.

No answer.

“Maybe they didn’t hear you,” suggests Jim Leafman. “Hey! You
okay?” Edgar shouts, louder this time. Still no answer.

Jack arrives with the flashlight and Edgar, already partly into
the corridor, takes it from him and moves forward. Jack follows, then Cliff
with Jim at the back.

They pass a crate of Buds, a couple of boxes of Miller Lites, a
case of Chardonnay, a tower of Mackeson stout. “Mackeson stout?” Jim says as he
passes it.

“Not a big seller,” Jack agrees over his shoulder. And still they
move forward.

“I think I can smell the Chinese restaurant,” Cliff says. “Smells
good,” says Jim.

“All that beer has made me hungry,” Cliff says.

By the time they’ve gone
another fifty feet or so, the only light is from Jack Fedogan’s flashlight.

“Somehow, Toto,” Cliff
says, “I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.”

“I found some scratching
on the wall here,” Edgar shouts back.

Jack is the first to respond. “What’s it say?”

Even unseen, Edgar’s
shrug makes itself felt. “Just scratches,” he says.

“And the corridor seems to split here.”

Looking back over his
shoulder, Jim Leafman is suddenly aware of two things: the first one is that someone
is following through the darkness behind them and the second is a sudden need
to pee. “Maybe we should get back,” he says, annoyed at the way his voice seems
to sound like a whine.

“Hey, Fortesque!” Edgar’s
voice booms. “Can you hear me?” And still there is no answer.

Turning around to face
the way they’ve come, Jim Leafman, who can feel his bladder expanding under
pressure, waves an arm into the darkness in front of him. He’s delighted when
it doesn’t connect with anything . . . such as one of those scaly mole
creatures in that old black and white movie starring John Agar. Suddenly, he
backs into something and someone shouts out.

“Jesus Christ, who’s
that?”

“Me,” says Jim. “Sorry.”

“You just started
walking up the backs of my damn legs,” snaps Edgar.

“I said I was sorry.”

Jim hears Jack say, “Hey,
yes: it does split two ways.” He turns around in time to see Edgar shine the
flashlight on a short spur to the main corridor which ends in a door. The light
judders across to the left and falls on a hole in the wall. In front of the
hole is a sewing machine, cobwebbed and dusty, a pair of men’s shoes — a spider
scurries out from one of the shoes and disappears out of the beam — a pickaxe,
a length of what appears to be cable wrapped in a loop, and a clutter of broken
bricks, masonry and concrete rubble.

“This is not your
average bar back room corridor, Jack,” Edgar says, his voice soft as he kneels
down and plays the beam over the hole.

“Which way you figure
they went?” Jim asks.

Cliff shouts for Edgar
to play the beam over the door again and he goes across and tries the handle.
It opens. “What’s in there?” Edgar asks.

“Not another corridor,”
Jim moans, increasingly convinced that he’s going to need to add to the musky
odour down here any time soon.

Pushing the door wide to
expose a railed ladder set into the concrete wall beyond leading up to a
circular cover some ten or twelve feet above, Cliff Rhodes says, “That must be
the street.” And, sure enough, the unmistakable sound of a vehicle moving over
the manhole cover confirms it.

“They went that way,”
Jack offers, “they could get their heads knocked off.”

Edgar returns the beam
to the hole in the wall. “Well,” he says, “I’m not even sure anyone could get
through here.” He reaches in and pulls at a piece of concrete. A soft rumble
sounds and then another.

“Ed, I think maybe we —”

The corridor shudders
beneath their feet and Jim Leafman grabs on to his crotch with both hands,
applying pressure to prevent a sudden dampening of his spirits. Edgar turns the
beam fully on to the hole and, way in front of them — or was it below? — they
hear crashing sounds, and a cloud of dust billows from the opening.

It takes a few minutes
before everyone stops coughing and spluttering. And then it’s Edgar who is the
first to speak. “Well,” he says, “I hope they didn’t go that way.”

“No, they went up the
steps,” says Jack.

“Then why didn’t they
say something?” Jim asks, suddenly aware that he’s shivering.

“You said before that
they’d get their heads knocked off going up that way,” Cliff Rhodes reminds
Jack. “Wouldn’t it be better if they’d gone through the hole?”

Jack doesn’t respond.

“I think they went
through the hole,” Cliff says.

“Ed?”

“I dunno, Jack,” Edgar
says. “If we’d thought, then maybe we could have seen footprints or hand marks.”
He shines the flashlight beam in front of the hole and the steady dust-cloud
still issuing from it. “But I just don’t know.”

“Maybe they went up
through the manhole cover and just —” Jim claps his hands, one hand shooting
off in front of the other. “— skidaddled.”

“Without saying
anything?”

“Well, they went through
here,” Edgar sighs, “then I reckon they’re flattened by now.”

“They went through the
hole,” Cliff says again. “And they’re not flattened. They’re on their way on a
great adventure.”

“What makes you so sure?”
Jim asks. “That they went through the hole?”

“Or the adventure part,” Jack adds.

“Faith,” Cliff says.

“Faith? What the hell
has faith got to do with it?” Edgar snorts.

Jack leans over in front
of the hold, hand over his mouth. “There’s no way anyone could get through
that,” he says, indicating the pile of rubble inside the hole.

“It wasn’t like that
when we first got here, Jack,” Cliff Rhodes says in a measured tone. “And as
for what faith has got to do with which way they want,” he adds, turning to
Edgar, “I can only say that faith has got something to do with everything.” “I
think we’re gonna start singing hymns,” Jack says to Jim Leafman. And then, “You
okay?”