The Twilight Prisoner (7 page)

It was just after two when Jack, holding tight to Cora's hand, touched down behind Euri on a small Midtown block of Korean restaurants and private clubs between Sixth and Seventh Avenues.

“I think it's in here,” Euri said, pointing to an elegant six-story stone and brick building with a small maroon awning. A living woman with blue hair tucked under a plaid cap walked by with her companion. Pointing to the theater, she began to talk in an animated voice about— Jack couldn't be sure—but what sounded like the musical
Cats
.

“Is that still on Broadway?” Cora asked.

“We're not on Broadway,” sniffed Euri. “This is
Off
-Broadway.”

Jack tried to smile at her, but she refused to look at him. “I guess that's why this doesn't look like much of a theater,” he said, remembering the flashy marquee and large crowds spilling onto the street at the St. James, the last Broadway theater they had visited. He pulled Cora through the door and into a deserted lobby that reminded Jack of a small, third-rate hotel. There was an unmanned front desk with paper signs taped to the front of it.
MANHATTAN CHURCH OF THE NAZARENE SERVICE
, read the first;
SUNDAY 11A. M., THIRD FLOOR
. The second read,
MOSCOW CATS THEATER. SATURDAY 8 P. M., THIRD FLOOR
. But it was the third that caught Jack's attention. It read,
WASHINGTON IRVING BISHOP
next to a big hieroglyphic Egyptian eye.
SATURDAY MIDNIGHT, THIRD FLOOR
.

“Bingo,” said Jack.

“Let's go,” said Euri, floating up till her head disappeared through the ceiling.

Cora looked anxiously at Euri's dangling, disembodied legs. “Would you mind if we take the elevator?”

Jack gave a sympathetic smile. “Sure.” He quickly flew up, grabbed Euri's foot, and pulled her back down through the ceiling.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Let's take the elevator.”

Euri looked at Cora and with a shake of her head, hit the call button. A few seconds later, with a clatter, it opened. Even Euri leaped backward as a snub-nosed living man with smears of greasepaint still on his face appeared in front of them, balancing several cages. As they stepped through him to get on the elevator, cries and yowls began to echo from the cages and through the empty lobby.
“Teehuh,”
the man purred back at them in a language that Jack guessed must be Russian.

“The cast of
Cats
,” said Euri dryly. “I hear they don't give autographs, though.”

For the first time since she had realized they were trapped in the underworld, Cora laughed. Euri began to grin but then looked annoyed. “It wasn't that funny,” she grumbled.

The elevator doors opened with a creak, and they floated out and through a set of wooden doors into a small, darkened, wood-paneled theater. A bearded man in a tuxedo was standing silently on an empty stage with a blindfold over his eyes. An audience of ghosts in nineteenth-century waistcoats and dresses floated above the folding seats, watching him intently. “Riveting show,” said Euri.

“Quiet!” interrupted a large ghost wearing a long black dress and lacy black veil. “Sir Washington Irving Bishop is about to perform the astounding blindfold fly trick!”

“That's Washington Irving Bishop?” Jack asked.

“The one and only,” said the woman. “The king of mentalists, mind-readers, and magicians. The international sensation! Back once again after his unforgettable 1889 show!” She pulled a handkerchief out of her pocket and, as if overcome by her own words, blew her nose.

“What's the blindfold fly trick?” Cora asked.

“It's the most remarkable trick ever,” the woman in black confided. “Sir Washington Irving Bishop will fly around the theater blindfolded, using nothing but the powers of his mind to stop him from crashing into things. Watch!”

Jack obediently turned to the stage where the magician had begun to float up over the crowd and was heading perilously toward the railing of the balcony. Just as the woman in black gasped in horror, the magician began to float away from the balcony. The crowd murmured. Even Jack was impressed until Euri quipped, “He's a ghost. He could just go through it.”

But as the man headed straight for a bank of lights, the audience craned their necks anxiously. “Amazing!” shrieked the woman in black as the magician once again turned. Several ghosts in the audience began to applaud.

“There's something funny going on here,” said Euri.

“How could you say that?” demanded the woman, who quickly turned to watch the magician and gasped again as he just barely avoided crashing into one side of the stage.

“You're cuing him,” Euri said. “Every time he almost hits something, you gasp or say ‘amazing.'”

The woman leaned over Euri in a menacing way. “How dare you! Sir Washington Irving Bishop has powers from the beyond!”

“This
is
the beyond,” said Euri.

Jack tapped the woman's sleeve. “Um, he's about to hit that piano.”

“Amazing!” the woman shrieked. Turning back to Euri, she narrowed her eyes. “You must be here from a competingact. Anna Eva Fay!Or J. N. Maskelyne. You're wasting your time. No mentalist is as great as Sir Washington Irving Bishop!”

“We're not here from a competing act,” Cora said soothingly. “We just want to talk to him about some death records. . . .”

“Are you his manager?” Jack asked. “Maybe you can introduce us after the show?”

“His manager?” The woman glowered. “I'm his mother!”

“He's about to crash into that row of seats,” said Cora.

Euri gasped.

The woman in black gave her a dirty look. “I had that one.” Then she turned back to Jack. “I doubt a personage as important as Washington Irving Bishop has time to discuss death records with you.”

Jack opened his mouth to protest, but Cora caught his eye and shook her head. “Mrs. Bishop, your son seems very talented,” she said brightly. “What was his unforgettable 1889 show?”

Washington Irving Bishop's mother woefully draped an arm across her forehead. “Butchery!” she wailed.

“The flair for drama runs in the family,” whispered Euri.

“Butchery?” Cora repeated. “I'm not familiar with that trick. . . .”

“Amazing!” Euri shouted, preventing the magician from colliding with the ceiling.

Washington Irving Bishop's mother reached beneath one of the theater seats and pulled out a book that she handed to Cora. “Mygreat opus,” she explained. Jack and Euri leaned over Cora's shoulder to read its title:
A Mother's Life Dedicated and an Appeal for Justice to All Brother Masons and the General Public; A Synopsis of the Butchery of the Late Sir Washington Irving Bishop. By Eleanor Fletcher Bishop.

“Something tells me this isn't a beach read,” said Euri.

Eleanor Fletcher Bishop ignored this comment and reaching over Cora, opened the book to a frontispiece photograph. “And there I am in maternal anguish,” she said, pointing to a woman decked out entirely in black leaning over Washington Irving Bishop's casket and staring lovingly at a line around the top of his forehead.

“What happened to him?” Cora asked.

Euri gasped and the magician narrowly missed the light fixture.

Eleanor Fletcher Bishop wrung her hands. “In the middle of his show at the Lambs Theatrical Club's 26th Street location, he had a fainting spell. He was prone to them, which is why I always left a note in his pocket cautioning not to bury him even if he seemed dead. Some doctors were in the audience that night, however, and they didn't read the note. His pulse was so weak, they assumed he had died, and so,” Eleanor Fletcher Bishop let out a loud sob, “they autopsied him alive!”

“That's horrible!” said Cora.

“Yes it is!” declared Eleanor Fletcher Bishop.

“Amazing!” shouted Euri. Only Jack, however, noticed that the magician was not in danger of hitting anything. Euri was just having fun sending him in different directions.

“Since then he has re-enacted his heart-stopping show at past and present locations of the Lambs Club, although this one is by far our favorite.” Eleanor Fletcher Bishop looked kindly at Cora. “Who do you want to find in the 1902 records, my dear?”

“Viele,” said Cora. “Egbert Viele.”

“The water engineer,” added Jack.

Ignoring her son spinning in helpless circles above her, Eleanor Fletcher Bishop continued in a loud whisper, “Well, I've certainly heard of him. Wretched man. He sued just about everyone. Here.” She reached under her seat, pulled out a black leather-bound book, and gave it to Cora. “My son should find a nice young ghost like you,” she said with a sigh.

“I thought Washington Irving Bishop kept the records,” said Jack as Cora handed it to him.

“Are you kidding?” said Mrs. Bishop. “He's a nincompoop. Look at him!”

Washington Irving Bishop was jerking around over the increasingly confused audience as Euri gasped over and over in quick succession. Jack turned back to the little black book. He stared at the cover, afraid to open it. What would they do if Viele had already moved on?

“What does it say?” asked Euri, taking a break between gasps.

Cora leaned closer as Jack flipped through it—Cs, Ls, Os—till he reached the Vs. Valmont, Van Dyne, Velasquez. “Viele!” Jack said, pointing to a name at the top of the page. He ran his finger along the column beside it. There was no bridge. He took a deep breath. Everything would be okay. Viele hadn't moved on.

But then, with a sinking feeling, Jack noticed Viele's haunts column. It was empty save for an official-looking stamp that read
UNDISCLOSED LOCATION: HAUNT CLASSIFIED
.

“Haunt classified?” Cora read aloud. “What does that mean?”

“It means we just hit a dead end,” said Euri.

Jack gave her a funny look.

Euri shrugged. “Okay, wrong choice of words. But there is an upside.”

“This better be good,” said Cora.

“Jack's theory about Viele being the one ghost who can help us find a way out must be right. Why else would the guards classify his haunt?They don't want him found.”

Cora frowned and shook her head. “Then we've got to figure out a way to find him. I can't stay here four nights!”

Jack looked around to make sure no ghosts besides Euri had heard her. Luckily, Mrs. Bishop was busy trying to regain control of Washington Irving Bishop, who had stopped following her cues.

“We've got to try to figure out where he would haunt, by ourselves,” Cora continued. “Euri, how do ghosts pick their haunts?”

“They usually haunt places where they spent a lot of time when they were alive.”

“And tell me again what we know about Viele's life?”

Jack pulled out the map. “He made this map of all the water sources in Manhattan.”

“So maybe he haunts someplace that has to do with water?”

“That could be anywhere,” said Euri. “Manhattan is surrounded by water. And there are hundreds of streams and pipes and sewers.”

Jack shook his head. “But Viele's map is concerned with only one type of water. Drinking water. He wanted to make sure builders wouldn't build on top of underground streams and contaminate them,” said Jack, remembering what Professor Schmitt had told him.

Cora turned to Euri. “If you cared about the city's drinking water, where would you haunt?”

Euri began to roll her eyes but then suddenly stopped. “Wait,” she said as her lips curled into a smile, “it totally makes sense. Tunnel Number Three!”

It was nearly 5 A. M., just two hours to sunrise, when Jack, Cora, and Euri touched down at the intersection of Tenth Avenue and 31st Street. At the northwest corner of Tenth Avenue, Jack spotted a tall aluminum fence.

Orange warning signs nailed to the top of the fence read:

1 LONG WHISTLE, THREE MINUTES TO BLAST.

2 SHORT WHISTLES, ONE MINUTE TO BLAST.

3 LONG WHISTLES, ALL CLEAR.

“Where are we?”

“That's the entrance to the tunnel,” Euri explained.

They flew over the fence and joined a group of living men in hard hats and steel-tipped rubber boots who stood around an enormous hole, eating sandwiches and smoking. Suddenly, with a whirring sound, a giant winch suspended over the hole dragged a green metal cage to the surface, and the men stamped out their cigarettes and crumpled the aluminum foil around their sandwiches into their pockets. Then one of them opened the door of the cage and the rest quietly boarded. The door of the cage slammed shut, and with a creak of cable, it began to descend into the hole.

“What
is
Tunnel Number Three, exactly?” said Cora, peering down into the dark hole after the cage.

“It's a water tunnel the city has been building for decades,” Euri explained. “I once went into it—” She cleared her throat. “It was before I discovered the cockroaches. Anyway, if Viele still cares about drinking water, it's the logical place for him to haunt. There are two other water tunnels under the city that bring in water from upstate. But they're on the verge of falling apart, and so, for the last twenty years, they've been rushing to build this one.”

“How do we get down there?” asked Cora.

Euri grabbed Cora's hand. “Three, two ...” she began to count down.

Cora's eyes widened. “You've got to be kidding.”

“One!” shouted Euri as she dove headfirst into the hole, pulling Cora with her.

Jack quickly lost sight of them, but Cora's screams echoed back out of the darkness. “Wait up!” he yelled, jumping in after them.

As Jack fell, the light from the surface began to shrink. He sailed through the cage where the workers were crammed together, their pale faces alert, and past walls of dripping black rock. He slowed himself down and peered beneath him, but he could only see darkness, no bottom to the enormous hole. He was sure that he had already fallen hundreds of feet, but it didn't seem possible to travel this far down in the middle of Manhattan.

Looking up, the hole to the surface had become a pinprick of faint light. The air grew warmer as he floated down, and drops of chemical-smelling water splashed against his face. Voices began to echo up from an invisible bottom, and fiery sparks burst out of the darkness. Jack landed in a puddle of icy water. Mist blanketed the air and he struggled to get his bearing. As he looked around, he caught glimpses of electric bulbs hanging from wires, rock walls buttressed with steel, and flashlights fading in and out of the mist, like ships caught in fog. A shape moved toward him and he suddenly realized it was Cora. Her hair was standing on end so she almost looked like a ghost herself. Euri floated next to her, grinning.

“Are you all right?” Jack asked.

“Do I look all right?” Cora answered.

“This ain't a playground,” said a deep voice with a thick New York accent.

Jack turned. A barrel-chested ghost in a yellow slicker was staring at him with his arms crossed over his chest. “The way you kids hurled yourselves down here . . . ya coulda killed me.”

“But you're already dead,” said Euri.

“And you know what killed me?” the man continued angrily.

“A falling ghost?” said Euri.

“An icicle. It fell off the top of the winch at the surface.”

Jack couldn't help himself. “You were impaled by an icicle?”

“You ever see an icicle fall five hundred feet? It becomes a weapon. But sandhogs have had worse deaths. Jimmy over there was cut in two by a drill.” He pointed to another slicker-clad ghost who was inspecting a case of dynamite.

Cora shuddered. “We'll be more careful. We've actually come looking for someone.”

“A hog?” the man interrupted.

Jack gave him a confused look.

“That's what we're called—the men that work these tunnels—sandhogs.”

“No,” said Jack. “An engineer. Egbert Viele.”

A loud roar suddenly filled the bottom of the tunnel. Jack and Cora jumped.

The ghost sandhog didn't flinch. “They're just blasting. Viele. Yeah. That guy.”

“See, he's down here!” Jack whispered to Cora.

“A real know-it-all,” the sandhog continued with a dismissive look. “He used to haunt over by the mole.”

Cora's face fell. “Used to?”

“He stopped coming here a few months ago.”

“Do you know where he went?” Jack asked.

The hog shrugged. “No idea. He left a few things by the mole, though.”

“Where's . . . the mole?” said Cora.

“That's the big drill. Come on. I'll show you.”

The sandhog ghost floated over the flooded shaft, down a tunnel lined with ventilation pipes, and hopped onto a railroad car. “This is almost as fast as flying,” he explained. Jack, Euri, and Cora boarded the back of the car. As it rattled through the tunnel, they passed living men with dirt-stained faces, shaking with their drills as they bored into rocks, and other living men piling debris onto conveyer belts. Finally, the car stopped in front of a giant steel machine that took up the entire diameter of the tunnel. Two living sandhogs were wedged inside of it while several more dead ones were wedged behind them.

“Hey, Clancy!” their guide shouted. “I have a bunch of kids here that was looking for Viele. They want to see the stuff he left behind.”

A red-faced ghost with a large belly backed out of the drill and surveyed them. He pointed to Cora. “Jeez, kid, you almost look alive.”

“They just took her off life support a few hours ago,” said Euri. “We're looking for anything Viele left behind.”

Clancy floated over to an indentation in the rock on one side of the tunnel that Jack hadn't noticed before. “He used to show up here every night, like this was his office or something,” Clancy explained. “Bossy fellow. He was always shouting at the living hogs about making sure the mole didn't hit a spring. Like they could hear him.”

“Do you know where he went?” Cora asked.

“He didn't talk to us much. Before he left we asked him where he was going, and he just smiled. Said that he was going someplace with a beautiful view.” Clancy looked around appreciatively at the wet, shining walls and patches of mist and shook his head. “He had a perfectly good one right here.” He reached into his pocket, pulled out a sheaf of papers, and handed them to Jack. “Anyway, here's what he left behind. Take what you like.” A whirring sound filled the tunnel as a living hog switched on a rotor on the mole. “I'd better go.”

With a grinding roar, the drill began to grind into the bedrock, shaking the entire tunnel.

“A beautiful view? Do you think he's moved on?” Cora shouted over the din.

“The record would have said that,” Euri shouted back. “Not‘haunt classified.'”

“Maybe he just wanted to get out of here,” yelled Jack over the earsplitting noise. He began floating away from the mole and back out of the tunnel. “Come on. We can look at these aboveground.”

As they rose up out of Tunnel Number Three, the sound of drilling and the orange sparks faded below. They flew through an ascending cage full of living men, their faces black with dust, their eerily white eyeballs staring anxiously upward. The entrance to the tunnel grew from a pinprick to a manhole to a small, pale pool of night sky. At last, they were out, and Jack felt jarred by the relative quiet and the handful of living people hurrying by as the whistles blew, oblivious to the explosions going on beneath their feet.

They landed a couple of blocks away in front of a closed deli called the Terminal Food Shop, its neon signs advertising beef hot dogs and chicken fingers. Jack pulled out the sheaf of papers while Cora and Euri huddled around him. The first few pages were entitled “The Topology and Hydrology of New York, 1865, by Egbert L. Viele,” and seemed to contain information about different water sources and whether or not they were sanitary. Then there was a copy of the water map Jack already had and another report on something called the Arcade underground railway. Finally, there was another map that Jack had never seen before. It was a small black-and-white map that showed a street grid of the middle of Manhattan interlaced with topographer's marks.
MAP OF THE LANDS INCLUDED IN THE CENTRAL PARK FROM A TOPOGRAPHICAL SURVEY, JUNE 17, 1856
, read lettering over the top. In the lower right-hand corner was the signature
EGBERT L. VIELE.

“It's Central Park before they made Central Park,” Jack remarked. He pointed to swirling patterns of lines that reminded him of fingerprints. “I think these indicate elevation.”

Cora pointed to a sprinkling of neat squares in the Eighties, just east of what was marked as Eighth Avenue.

They were interspersed between what looked like rock formations. “What do you think these are?”

“I don't know,” said Jack. “There is no Eighth Avenue on the Upper West Side anymore.” Then he noticed something else that was no longer there. Directly east of the sprinkling of squares was a large rectangle marked
RECEIVING RESERVOIR.
“There's no reservoir there, either. That's the Great Lawn.”

Euri looked unimpressed. “Okay, so Viele made a map of Central Park before it was Central Park. But he also made all these other reports and maps. He could be anywhere. In Central Park. At the Arcade underground railway, whatever that is. At some stream in one of these reports. If we search all the places he mentions, it could take days. And we don't have—”

Euri stopped herself just in time. But Jack knew she was right. A tossed-off remark about a beautiful view and a bunch of maps and reports didn't add up to much of a clue. He looked at his pocket watch. There was just an hour left till dawn.

“Well, we can't just give up,” said Cora. “I can't stay here for four days.”

Jack closed his eyes. He suddenly knew he couldn't keep on lying to Cora. He had to tell her what would happen if they didn't get out by the end of the third night. For a moment, he imagined her dead—flying alone, her once cheerful face lifeless and pale, to her mother's apartment. If she were lucky she would become a poltergeist and be able to indicate her presence the way Euri had at the tenement. But there was nothing violent about her separation from her mother, and it was more likely she'd just become an ordinary ghost, haunting her mother in the painful one-sided way that she had already done. Even worse than this image, though, was the thought of her dying on the dawn of their third night in the underworld and realizing he had lied to her.

He turned to Euri. “I need to talk to Cora alone,” he said. “Is it okay if we meet you back at one of the fountains?”

Euri's face fell, but she quickly waved them off. “Fine. Meet me near the fountain at Fifty-third and Madison at dawn. I have errands to run, anyway.”