The New York Magician (9 page)

Today there was no sound of anyone present. I broke through stagnant construction barriers in the rail yards above Fifty-Seventh, passing beneath the eye of the enormous Trump development that loomed just east of the flat space, and followed the spearhead underground to the north.

It wasn't dark in here, thanks to numerous gratings facing the river, but it wasn't bright. I walked uptown at a regular pace, noting the unchanging direction of the Spearhead's pointer. Some thirty blocks later, the empty gravel expanse of the tunnels was interrupted by a mass of plywood and debris on the eastern side, formed into what looked like a maze of cubicles. The outer ones had windows cut into them, looking out onto the tracks - a squatter's paradise. There were no people visible, though, and no sounds other than the ever-present noises of the city's belly. I stopped for a moment and listened; nothing. Pulling out the Desert Eagle, I held it and my focused palm ready and felt for the pointer. It was angling right, pulling me into the maze.

Damn.

I took a moment and pulled energy out of the pocket watch, enfolding myself in muffling waves. I couldn't make myself invisible, and there wasn't enough traffic here to truly take eyes away from me, but I could certainly blend into the surroundings well enough in my tan and gray outfit. The pistol, matte gray finish already swallowing light, had its own permanent link to the watch, making it incredibly difficult to see unless one knew it was there. I held it out in front of me and stepped into the maze.

Ten minutes later, I was lost. The tunnels were some hundred yards behind me, and I was moving inside an ancient and formidably large storm drain somewhere underneath what must have been West End Avenue by that point. There were still intermittent structures breaking up the lines of sight, all abandoned; the rail lines had re-opened some two years before, and the squatters of the tunnels had all been evicted. Some had left everything they owned, apparently - arcane and bizarre collections of the City's detritus stretched out in all directions. One cube was stacked from floor to ceiling with obsolete but beautiful soda water dispensers, the old refillable kind in bright green and blue glass with metal siphons; stacked in wooden carriers, there must have been a thousand of them.
Hammer Beverages
, read most of the wooden boxes. All were empty.

A pile of typewriters greeted me around the next corner, Underwoods and Smith-Coronas, IBMs and the odd late-model electronic Panasonic or Canon. The manuals were in all conditions, those on the top of the pile in relatively good shape with those further down rusted into undifferentiated masses. I threaded my way through the museum of obsessive collecting, flowers of years on New York streets, and continued.

The spearhead gave me only a few moments' warning, twisting slightly in its compartment as I turned to follow a passageway. I froze, immediately, at the sound of voices in the next corridor Westward - then moved again, around the corner towards a slight pale flicker of bright white light and the hissing of a Coleman lantern. Mutterings were coming from the room ahead, shadows moving across the lamp. I listened again, then reached out with more than ears; twistings were coming from there, too, the telltale feeling of work on higher planes reaching out to touch my tools. I stepped through the final doorway into a pool of gaslight.

There were two figures seated there, staring intently at cards laid out on a ruined wooden tabletop. The cards were from the standard Western deck, but there was more than one deck in play, judging from the duplicates, and the pattern was unknown to me. I moved closer to the lamp, gun trained on the two of them. They ignored me. Both were dressed in rags, appropriate to the surroundings; both were men, older, in a condition that would surprise you not at all if you met them sleeping in a subway station.

But they were not demented. Nor were they drugged. They were silently moving the cards around on the table, in a pattern that suddenly I realized looked roughly like Manhattan. There must have been a couple of hundred cards. One of them turned and looked directly at me, then snorted and turned back, moving a six of Clubs three inches to the right - or Westwards, if the map held true. I just stared.

"It's the boy." The other spoke without looking at me, voice as rough as his skin and clothes.

"Mmmm." The first tapped another card, this one face down, then withdrew his hand and looked over the arrangement.

The second looked up, also directly into my eye, through shields and gloom and past the brilliance of the lamp. I saw the rheum and milky color of his blindness, then, and lowered the gun but not my flash hand. "Hello, fathers."

"Polite, he is, at least."

I moved closer, into the light. "May I sit?"

The one who'd first looked at me turned again. I noted that he was wearing a New York Mets cap, incongruously clean; his compatriot was bareheaded. "Sit."

I looked about, located a chair from a pile of several, and pulled it up to the table, then sat. I watched them quietly for a few minutes as they slowly and carefully shuffled cards around the table; from the closer vantage point I could see a rough chalk outline drawn around the cards that, indeed, resembled Manhattan's shoreline. In the center of the island was a rectangle of leaves and grass, where the park would be. I couldn't determine any other pattern in what they were doing; the cards moved, some slightly and some rapidly, either inches or yards. Some were face up, and some face down.

There was power on the table, but I was unable to determine its purpose.

The Mets fan placed a final card on the map, somewhere in East Harlem, and turned to me. "Ask."

I frowned. "Are you moving cards to determine change? Or are you tracing change with them?"

"Is there a difference?"

"There is to me, father."

The bareheaded wizard nodded. "You're a tool user, boy. The flow is there. Can you feel the flow?"

I reached a palm out over the table. The Mets fan hissed once, but didn't interfere. I spread my hands, reaching for the tendrils of energy that moved and built around my tools when I used them, but there was nothing. Still, I could tell the space above the table was far from empty. "No."

"That's good."

I turned to him, surprised. "Why good?"

The Mets fan answered me, his voice gone harsh. "Because then you may leave this place, boy."

I looked from one to the other. "You can’t leave? Either of you?" Both shook their heads. "Why not?"

The Mets fan spoke. "My name is Brian. I've been here eighteen years. Since the power came. It brought me here, back when the tunnels were bad, son, real bad. It's been good, and bad, and now there's no one, but we stay. The power keeps us here. If we move, the balance breaks. We're all that keeps it in check." He reached out and flipped a card, apparently at random. The nine of diamonds, near Times Square.

I looked carefully across the table. "What is the balance?"

"The balance is what you see. All the Gifted, all the Others, they're all here. They come, and go, but within Manhattan Island, we watch and balance. That's our task."

"All of us? We're all there?"

Brian reached out and flipped a card just East of Times Square. The Queen of Spades. "Do you know her?"

"Who?" I looked at the card. It was a Bicycle, the plastic worn.

"Touch."

I placed my finger on the card, face up on the table, and there it was-

The drink was too strong for him, far too strong, but he'd been sneering at her for an hour or more and there was nothing for it. Three swallows and he'd fall, if he was lucky; if he persisted, tried to prove his strength and took the fourth, then the growths would start in his throat and lungs, and he would waste and wrinkle as his life poured itself into the twisted seeds that took his blood. The Water of Death into the martini glass, just a drop, placed on the bar, and watch for his sneering smile. The smile of the human who thinks he's found the answer, just like all the rest.

Four swallows, little sheep, just four-

I pulled my finger away instinctively. I was sweating, suddenly, my flash hand curled into a tight fist at my side and the pistol lying on its side on the table where I'd placed it instinctively when I touched the card. Baba Yaga's thoughts were not just cold and hard, not just earthen and rotten, not just warm and lush, but completely and utterly wrong; they felt of crystalline age and swam with memories a thousand-fold too complex for my brain.

"Where-" My voice cracked. I swallowed (one swallow) and tried again, forcing spittle into my mouth. "Where is my card?"

Brian looked at me, then reached out and plucked a pasteboard Hoyle from the table and held it out, the back to me. I looked at the pattern, then at him. "Can I-"

"You can, but will you?"

I reached out and took the card.

There was a flash of black luminescence around my hand. The card was ice cold. I turned it quickly, a snap of the fingers, to see the front. Whatever was there was intent on not being seen. I could make out the card's shape, and the grubby off-white of dirty laminated surface, but every time I tried to focus in on the card itself the blur that resided there reached up a little further into my forebrain, dug in its fists and squeezed.

I closed my eyes and pushed the card at the table. It left my hand, clearing my head immediately. I opened my eyes again to the more familiar blur of tears. "What-"

Brian's voice broke through. "You can hold the card. You, and only you, cannot read it."

I picked up the Desert Eagle. "Look, I came here looking for something, or someone."

"Yes." They both said it, in stereo. It was disconcerting. I had to fight down the urge to shoot one of them just to restore normalcy.

"There's someone downtown who shouldn't be here. He shouldn't be here at all. But he is, and he was called. Who called him?"

The other voice spoke. "You did."

"Bullshit. I can't call Others. I can Hear and See them, that's all."

Brian's partner spoke again, looking down at the table's surface. "Doesn't change what happened. You called him. Perhaps not on your own. But you did." He looked up suddenly and stared at me through his blind eyes. "And now you know. That's all." He stood, far too quickly for his age, and Brian stood as well. I raised the pistol.

"Wait a damn-"

The room was empty. I jumped backwards reflexively, crashing to the floor as I tripped over some unknown piece of debris. The gun didn't go off and I kept hold of it, but at the cost of hitting the ground hard. I sat there for a second in the dimness, then stood up. The Coleman lantern was dark. I reached for it gingerly where it sat on the table, and my fingers tore through a thick coating of cobwebs. I pulled my hand back in surprise, then dug in my coat for my Maglite. The lantern was dusty, old, and the glass cracked. There were no mantles inside it.

The cards were gone, and the dust on the table's surface was thick and undisturbed.

"Oh, shit." I rubbed my head. "Shit, shit shit." Holstering the gun, I surveyed the room again. Nothing anywhere. The silence wasn't complete, not underneath the bones of New York, but it was much deeper than it had been some seconds ago. I couldn't figure out why what just happened had fright running up my spine. Given what I dealt with on a daily basis, this was surely only somewhere middle of the road, but my sympathetic nervous system flatly refused to agree with me. The sweat was coming cold from my brow.

Then the noise started.

It was very faint – its source could have been twenty feet or ten miles away - but it was coming from the tunnel entrance opposite where I'd come in. It was a regular metallic sound, though; nothing random and nothing soft. I twisted the Maglite to open up the beam to its full width, pulled the Desert Eagle again, and moved into the tunnel, flashlight held out to my left in case something got aimed at it.

Gun in hand, I went to meet the noise.

Fifteen feet past the door, there was a metal grating from floor to ceiling. There was a huge round hole in the center of it, the bar edges flowing and melted at the hole's periphery. I moved past it uneasily, into a lower tunnel. There was a splashing around my boots which I hoped was water but my nose told me that if there was water down there, it wasn't alone. The noise was rising in volume, coming from the darkness ahead. A regular thumping, or tapping, two beats then a pause, then again.

After another fifty feet there was a flickering light ahead which took me some moments to realize was coming around a blind corner in the storm drain. I wasn't positive, but it looked as if the tunnel turned right at least ninety degrees. I leaned against the right wall and raised the gun, watching the light and listening to the sound move closer to the corner.

The sound was regular enough to make concentration difficult. Thump-thump. I could only tell the source was still in motion from the movement of the light on the wall at the corner. Thump-thump. There was no way to determine precisely how close to the corner the other was so I waited, sweating now in the chill gloom. Thump-thump.

The light, when it moved into my line of sight, was blinding. It came around the corner and stopped, and I lifted the gun.
"Fucking freeze right there!
"

Nothing happened for perhaps five seconds, then there was a booming laugh which reached out to me from behind the light (another Coleman, I could barely see, twin silk testicles of the mantles burning in their fragile ashen web of white gas). Then the lantern dimmed with the squeaking of its valve, and a voice no less enormous than the laugh said, in a rich Irish brogue, "Sure, and you'd be Michel, wouldn't you, boy?"

The gun sagged downwards. I recovered enough to re-safety it. As I did so, the other figure moved towards me. In the lower light of the banked lantern, I could see a huge man, dressed in industrial coveralls and boots. In his left hand, he held the lantern; in the right, a massive wrench, scraped in bright patterns where it had struck the concrete or stone of the tunnel.

I looked at him for a moment then lowered the gun entirely. "Who the hell are you?"