Underground (25 page)
Another project on Washington—the Brodeck and Schlesinger building between Third and Fourth—fell down a month later while its second floor was under construction. It was no wonder they’d turned the area into a park, since it seemed to be bad luck for buildings. Between the two events I spotted records of several more deaths with the same hallmarks. After the second building went down, though, the deaths had stopped. I didn’t know what had put an end to them—the reason for the collapse was again given as unstable piers—but I knew from experience that it was possible for magic to bring down a building and wondered if that was the real cause of the second building’s fall.
As I read forward, that period of Seattle’s history was full of freakish events, from the city’s project to raise the streets—but not the sidewalks—that had resulted in the deep corridors I’d visited, to the “inadvertent suicide” of an unlucky pedestrian who fell from the streets above. There were other odd deaths, but I didn’t find another death by monster until that of a transient named Charles Olander in 1949. I assumed this was Chuck-o, and I felt pretty sure I was right when I read that his body had been found at the other end of Occidental, near the current football stadium, where some pipes had broken in the street during the quake. That would have been a block or less from the old Duncan and Sons shop with its life-size plaster horse standing on a platform over the sidewalk.
Quinton sat down next to me, brushing a hand down my back and jarring me out of my thoughts about whatever was feeding on people beneath the streets.
“Not much on the Sistu,” he said. “A lot of the Native American and local legend books are at the Ballard branch. And the other archives didn’t turn up anything like it outside the Seattle area for any time period, so it’s not a moving phenomenon—nor is it government related or monitored that I could discover. It’s localized.”
“Why would the government—” I started.
A voice came from overhead, telling us the library would be closing in five minutes. I tried my question again, but Quinton shook me off. I picked up my notes and got ready to go back out into the cold.
Once outside he said, “The government gets into a lot of strange research, so I checked an old info source of mine to see if there was anything like this, but I didn’t get a hit. What did you get?”
“Not as much as I’d like,” I admitted, sighing. “But there is a matching geographic area and everything happened down on the street level south of the skid road—it used to be Mill Street, but they changed the name to Yesler Way during the rebuilding.
“The first related death was right after the fire. A couple of buildings collapsed down on Washington Street—the northern border of the bricks. There were several deaths in the area from Washington to what’s now Royal Brougham between April when the first building went down and May when the second one went. I don’t know what made the deaths stop, but it coincides with the second building’s collapse. The southernmost body was found the day the second building fell, down in a dumping ground which was in the same location as the current hotel project at Occidental and Royal Brougham. Apparently that area had been used as a dump for a while—debris from the fire was hauled there too— and that wasn’t the first or the last body ever found there.”
“I’d bet that was the Seattle equivalent of dumping the bodies in the East River in New York,” Quinton said, starting to walk. “You can’t drop them into Elliot Bay, since they’d come back on the next high tide, or stick in the mudflats at low tide.”
My own stride was slower than his, my knee now feeling stiff and swollen. “Yeah. Looks like a lot of stuff came back at high tide. The paper had the tide table on the front of every edition because the sewer backflushed whenever the tide came in so . . . you had to know when it was safe to flush your toilet. With that kind of tidal action, I doubt anyone dumped anything in the bay that they wanted to see the last of.”
Quinton paused and matched his pace to mine. “Hell, no. What if Uncle Peter suddenly came back from his fatal fishing trip to embarrass everyone with a suspicious bullet wound or something?”
I smiled. “What if, indeed? But don’t you think it’s funny: they raised the streets for toilets? I wonder if it still gets wet down on the old street level at high tide. . . .”
“I can attest it does not. The seawall keeps Elliot Bay at bay. For the most part. There are seeps of course but the buildings have pumps and drains in the basements.”
“Another undergrounder secret?”
“Nope. A Seattle utilities problem. It’s a whole new definition of rising damp, considering the current downtown sidewalks are about thirty feet above the old sidewalks, so to keep the sewer lines at a good angle, the streets farther up the bluff must be about . . . seventy feet above their original levels, maybe more.”
“Impressive engineering.”
Quinton eyed me with a silly, self-conscious smile. “Yes, indeed.”
I laughed and didn’t even feel guilty. “Is that flirting?”
“That’s what it said on the instructions. Did I do it badly?”
“No, but don’t let it get out of hand,” I warned with a lack of sincerity.
“No, ma’am,” he replied, smothering a chuckle. He made his face serious. “All right, all right. Back to work. So we know the area is the same for all the significant deaths and that whatever is causing them comes and goes.”
“I think our monster’s trapped down there,” I said.
“It seems to get around if it wants to,” Quinton replied.
“Only up to a point. It doesn’t wander far from the core of the bricks and never has so long as white men have been keeping records. We don’t know that it’s this Sistu, but it’s the only monster anyone’s come up with and it’s of native origin and, as you said, the phenomenon is localized to Seattle’s tenderloin. It seems to turn up when things get torn apart in the historic district, which used to be the mudflats—Indian fishing grounds. We don’t know when or how it was last put to bed, but it does seem to have a limit or a way to box it up. This creature doesn’t just run amok forever. We don’t know enough about the history of the underground to know exactly what’s been done down there or when that might have unleashed and later banished this thing.”
“We need to take the tour.”
“What?”
“The Underground Tour. I think they’ve got one late tour left today, if we hurry.” Quinton grabbed my elbow to support me and began to jog down the snow-crusted street toward Pioneer Square. “Can you run? C ’mon. The historian may know something if we catch him.”
“The Underground Tour? It’s a tourist trap,” I objected, skittering and wincing along behind him.
“Yeah,” he agreed, “but it’s about real history. They spin it for the guests, but the facts are still the same. If anyone knows anything about the history of the underground and the strange things that happened in it, it’ll be the tour people.”
We slid and slipped down the hill to the Square and made it in at the back of the last tour of the day. We’d missed the introductory speech, but since the group was small, and the weather lousy, the woman at the ticket window let us join the group as they headed out to the totem pole. Our guide was a tall, lanky man in his fifties with one lazy eye and hair that had faded from red to gingery beige. His voice was clear and loud without being a shout and his patter was funny enough to distract the small group from stamping their chilling feet too much.
“I know it’s pretty cold out here so I’m going to keep this part short and get us in under the street in just a minute. A lot of the area we’re going to be walking through is condemned and of course it’s all private property, so you’ll want to stay close to me and not wander off. It’s perfectly safe so long as you stay on the wooden walkways and cleared paths—our rats are all union here and they don’t like to cross any lines, but they do occasionally pick off stragglers, so your best bet is to stay with the group and . . . are there any children here . . . ? No? Oh, well . . . usually we call ’em bait, but you adults will have to take your chances.”
That got a laugh.
Our guide, whose name we’d missed, talked briefly about the totem pole—stolen by the city fathers on a trip to Alaska, burned in the fire, and replaced at the cost of the old pole plus the new one—and the pergola, which had been built as a trolley stop, knocked down by a runaway truck and rebuilt.
“Unfortunately,” our guide went on, “when the repaired pergola was reinstalled, the city felt that the area needed more support and poured tons of concrete down into the space below to shore up the street corner—didn’t know there was anything down there did you? But there is. The classiest underground restroom you will never see. Like the pergola, it was built for the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition of 1909 and was billed as the most luxurious ‘subterranean comfort station’ in the world at the time. Marble floors, murals, a shoe shine station, a barber, even a tailor’s stall to make repairs to your clothes. People came from all over the world to inspect our restroom and build subterranean comfort stations of their own.”
One of the tourists held up a hand and asked if the comfort station was still there.
Our guide shook his head. “Yes, but unfortunately it’s now sealed behind that load of cement the city poured in. These large, decorative lamp standards around the Square are actually ventilation shafts for the comfort station down below—just like the uprights in the pergola. And speaking of down below, let’s get in there.”
The group trailed the tall guide across the Square and street and down First Avenue half a block, the guide talking at each pause about whatever the group happened to be standing near. The pace was slow enough and the distance short enough that I had no difficulty keeping up, in spite of my complaining knee.
The guide opened a gate and led us all down a flight of metal-framed stairs and through a metal door to an area of brick arches similar to the place where Quinton and I had found the vampire attacking Jay. We continued under the sidewalk on a walkway of creaking boards, past piles of discarded junk, while our guide filled us in on the history of the underground and how it came to be.
We followed him north, through a hole in the wall, to where a sudden burst of light came down from work lights strung near the ceiling. A lot of broken furniture, pipes, cans, and other strange objects leaned in the far corner. We took a dogleg turn and came out into an L-shaped room with a door into a building on the inside corner. Flickering light came in through the ceiling and a once-fancy sign with lightbulb sockets and blue and white enamel stood canted in a corner spelling out “SAM ’S—” something; the second half was missing. The guide stood in the middle of the room under the odd light.
I felt much colder in that area and got an unpleasant sensation of something crawling on my skin. I edged a little farther into the room, putting my back to the stone wall near the door in the corner, but couldn’t escape from the feeling of dread. The room was fairly boiling with Grey and bright with blazing energy lines in hot yellow and blue, but I couldn’t see an immediate source for my discomfort.
“We’re now directly under the corner of Yesler and First,” the guide began.
So this was the “worst corner” in the underground according to the Indians, where a native shaman had driven away a pack of ghosts. Maybe that was an explanation for the energy levels and my disquiet.
“You’re standing now at the original street level of Seattle. Now, back in the 1860s through 1880s this was all mudflats, and as we told you upstairs, it got a little wet at high tide. So after the fire, the city had a great opportunity to raise the streets up from the tide line and make downtown safe, dry, and sewage free. But raising the streets was a huge undertaking—and undertaking is the right word here because although no one died during the fire, a few people did die in the streets and especially the sidewalks afterward.”
He pointed up to the modern sidewalk above us. “This was all open for several years while the streets went up. So the people who wanted to get into the buildings to shop or do business would come down a ladder or stair at the end of the block and walk along the sidewalks down here. Unfortunately, they occasionally missed the ladders and fell to their deaths. This was about the same time miners on the way to the Klondike were pouring into Seattle. Heavy merchandise from the shops often ended up stacked on the streets and sometimes a box or barrel would fall into the open sidewalks and kill a pedestrian here below. So you can see it was a real adventure going shopping downtown in those days.”
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