Shadows in the White City (32 page)

“We need a thorough search with a lot more men.”

“Aye…if that is the rascal that you fellows are after, I agree one hundred percent.”

“What about the lantern?” asked Behan, indicating the light some forty or so yards in.

“It's not my lantern,” said the guard.

“Shut it up and lock the door, then,” replied Behan, getting to his feet and going for the stairwell, shaken and wondering how his best friend, Logan, might be faring about now, and wondering too about Alastair Ransom's progress.

 

Alastair also heard the strange noise that Behan hadn't been able to decipher. Neither man could know it'd been the death throes of Jedidiah Logan, but Ransom's instincts were sharp enough to insist that he douse his light when he'd heard the bizarre sounds that had lazily wafted down the corridor toward him. He doused the light by dropping the door that acted as a gauge, allowing air into the glass and metal casing of the handheld lantern, a Chicago Police
issue and regardless of its clumsiness, a wonderful improvement on earlier cop lights.

Now Alastair stood in near absolute darkness, but somewhere in the distance ahead of him, he saw some small light source. He imagined it one of the vents mentioned by the guard. How long ago had he had that conversation? A few minutes before? It felt like a week.

He checked his pocket watch to note how much time had elapsed, but even before popping the cover, he realized he'd not be able to read it in this blackness. So he moved on toward the light source ahead.

Ransom felt his way along, hand over hand, following the earthen walls that'd been cut out by men and machines. As a result, his hands became dirty and cold, but there was no help for it—except his cane. He began using his cane to tap his way along the side wall. Between his cane and the lantern, which he most certainly would need coming back, he realized his hands were literally full. If he must pull his gun at any time, he'd have to drop either the cane or the lantern, and he loved his cane.

These thoughts filled his mind as he continued down the now too quiet passage. If there were rats down here, why hadn't he heard rodent sounds? Not so much as a rodent peep—only that odd, all-too-human cry he'd earlier heard. He'd also heard muffled laughter and shouting that seemed to be filtering in from above at the fair, crowded to capacity.

The absence of a large rat population meant one of three things. The guard had exaggerated? The rats had run ahead of Ransom? Or had the rats run ahead of others lurking here?

Perhaps the most deadly animal scurrying about here was man and woman, and children born of them.

Another hundred yards and he found the source of weak light. Indeed a vent built into the wall on lakeside. He peered out through the mechanism to see only grim darkness outside, roiling, angry clouds out over the lake. The vent was a concrete bowl meant to fill up and spill into the tunnel
should the lake rise over its banks, and indeed a metal mesh cover had been ripped away by human hands. Pranksters or monsters, he wondered, sizing up the vandalism. Getting out this way, especially with water rushing in, appeared unlikely and at best a difficult battle. He imagined a series of such vents filled to the brim could create a drowning pool where he stood.

A strange noise commanded his attention, and he wheeled, his wolf's-head cane raised to strike out at a rat scurrying toward him. The creature barely acknowledged him as a threat and moved to the grillwork and climbed out into the world.

“Smart fellow…knows when to walk away,” Alastair said of the rat as his tail disappeared over the lip of the vent. “Perhaps smarter than I.”

Cook County Morgue same time

“Where is he, Christian?” Jane had come to Cook County in a state of terror. She had not seen Alastair the entire day, and she sensed he was in trouble. Her daughter Gabrielle was with Dr. Fenger, the two of them doing an autopsy on an unidentified body found in the river. Fenger was determined to create as complete a description of the unknown victim as possible, regardless of the likelihood of the John Doe going off to Chicago's potter's field to be buried at city expense. Christian remained determined to keep Gabby Tewes away from the Leather Apron victims, and to do so, he kept her busy with more run-of-the-mill autopsies such as this.

When Gabby learned that Ransom had come to the hospital earlier in the day to see Christian, she joined Jane in pursuing Dr. Fenger over the matter of Alastair's whereabouts. It took some hard talk, but eventually Fenger told them of Alastair's interest in the passageways below the World's Fair.

“Why would he go there alone? Is he mad?” Jane asked.

“Well, as I understand it, he took Behan and Logan along with him. Besides, it's just a suspicion that may or may not come to—”

“But why not flood the area with an army of police?”

“Because a bloody army of police are moonlighting these days to control the crowds at the fair!”

“Alastair should have backup,” said Gabby, “and I think I know how to get it.”

Jane turned to her daughter, asking, “What've you in mind?”

“A call box near the fair. That is an automatic guarantee of twenty-four men and a wagon.”

“But you need a key to open a call booth,” countered Jane. “Don't you?”

“Mother, I know people on the force now.” Gabby tore her medical frock away while going for the door.

“But what if Alastair is in no danger, and you call out a squad of cops for no reason?” asked Fenger.

“I am willing to take that chance,” said Jane.

“And pay the fine?” he asked.

“And pay the fine, yes!”

“You might just anger Alastair. I suggest you two give this more thought!” Dr. Fenger shouted as they rushed out of the morgue for the nearest cab. “Damn,” he cursed, tore off his medical frock and rushed out after them.

Alastair pushed on through the black void, determined
to gain as many footsteps in this underworld as possible before having to return to his starting point. In the semi-dark near the vent, he'd read his clock, opening it on its chime—the music being “Green Sleeves.” The time read 8:44 p.m. Complete darkness in the storm outside only made the passageway he stood in blacker as he'd continued on.

Silence here proved complete save for the gay sounds of the fair overhead, noises filtering in through the same vents as the light. “Light…sound…OK…water not so good,” he said to himself, trying to dispel the gloom. His own voice seemed the only warmth here, the only tie with a world outside of this place. If these tunnels were built for a purpose, he could not tell; he imagined they must've been useful during the winter months of preparation for the fair to move goods, lumber, and materials to work sites.

He had only thirteen minutes to be back at the sub-basement door. Having decided to keep the lantern turned off, he now held it in his cane hand, thus freeing up his gun hand, should he need it.

His eyes had grown more accustomed to the dark, and he could make out the shape of the walls as he moved through
the passageway, going toward the next vent, where a smidge more light filtered into this dungeon.

The downward slope on the floor had steadily increased, and now he stood in water up to his ankles.

“What the hell else?” he asked of the problems he faced here. “Pour on the misery.”

Ahead of him, he saw a slick shiny surface of what looked to be black ice. Not so, more water…deeper. Deep enough to have a current.

“Shit,” he muttered. “Time to turn around. Nothing here to see.”

Alastair was in midturn, prepared to go back the way he'd come, when something floating in the water caught his peripheral vision. At first he thought it trash, perhaps washed in from the drains, perhaps Thom Carmichael's
Herald—and a fitting place for it too
, he inwardly laughed.

He took a step toward leaving when something in his brain said,
No, that's not a newspaper floating there but clothing, a coat, perhaps.
He moved in for a closer look, and he relit the lantern, opening it full. The light created huge black swaths of darkness and shadow, the biggest being his own. It also illuminated the bloody clothing floating by from a secondary passageway.

Alastair waded into the water here, up to his thigh, and using his cane, he pulled in the clothing. It did not look like something long in the water, and in fact, it appeared a somewhat expensive tweed coat and there were snatches of linen from a shirt. As he examined the ripped coat, he smelled the blood even as his hands became painted with it. His reflex was to drop it but one hand had hit a hard metal object that pricked his finger—a badge.

Under the grim light, Alastair studied the badge number: CPD-1438. Jedidiah's badge, his coat, his bloodied shirt.

He immediately doused the light, and he carefully waded his way toward the direction from which the bloody clothes had drifted. The blood had been fresh, coming off in his hands. Whoever had killed Logan could not be far away.

Ransom knew he must proceed with great caution and haste at once.

Even the noise of wading through the water was too great, as it could alert someone waiting in the shadows ahead.

He recalled telling the guard to send for help after twenty minutes if he should not return by then. Time had already run beyond that, so someone would be alerted. He prayed backup was on the way.

More rats went past, swimming this time.

As Alastair continued on, the incline here was going uphill, the water subsiding behind him as a result. Overhead, out in the larger world, he could hear claps of thunder that the humorist Mark Twain would call a real sock-dollopper! Nature's riotous calamity. Most certainly the clouds had burst.

Whoever was in the passageway ahead of him, they—
for there was whispering now
—must be aware of the storm overhead as well, and that the passages here could become a deathtrap if Lake Michigan swelled beyond her breakers. The resounding splash of waves slapping into the bowl-vents clearly announced this danger as a growing threat.

Ransom could not let whoever had killed Logan find their way to the nearest vent or to an open entryway into the museum exhibits. He must act quickly.

Another sound came to his ears as he inched closer to the whispering voices. It was the sound of feeding as of rabid animals devouring a carcass. Ransom feared the worst. The family he had been tracking all this time were here en masse, and they had descended on Logan, killed him many times over, and were now feeding on his remains like a pack of hyenas.

The thought infuriated Ransom almost as much as it terrified him.

He had come out of the water and feared that he could be seen by these rabid animals whose eyes surely, even supernaturally, worked more efficiently in pitch than in light, like the eyes of a pack of unholy dogs. He rested his cane against
the wall, careful not to allow it to fall or clatter. He then took out his flint box lighter, and opening the lantern, he lit it.

Five pairs of eyes met his at once. They were some twenty yards off, the entire coven, all situated over Logan's nude, mutilated corpse, some off to the side, nursing hunks of flesh cut from Jedidiah's flanks and backside.

Ransom felt as if he'd gotten a glimpse into the last rung of Dante's Inferno, but there was not a moment to think. He hurled the lantern at the enemy, and it hit the woman hunched over Logan's flanks, its contents spilling over her and setting her aflame. Two of the children leapt back into shadow, while the oldest struggled to save its mother only to catch its own clothes afire.

The father hurled himself at Ransom, his huge knife extended like a lance, his mouth bloody with feeding on raw flesh. Ransom raised his blue gun and fired at the same instant the inhuman creature fell atop him, sending him into the water. Ransom went under with the dead weight of the man he'd shot threatening to drown him even in death, but in fact, the monster was yet alive, stabbing at him with the knife to the end. Just as the hyena-man had held on to the knife, Ransom had held firm to his weapon. The knife came down, tearing into Alastair's left shoulder, as the fiend was going for his heart. At the same time, Ransom fired twice more, and the second and third shot ended any movement in the madman. Only three bullets remained in his weapon.

Ransom clambered to his knees in the blackness, and he remained in the water when the woman and eldest child, sharing flames, leapt into the muddy sewage together to save themselves. Ransom aimed and fired, putting a bullet through the woman's brain when suddenly he was hit with a powerful blow to one leg where another child had stabbed him. The final child leapt on his chest and tore at his face with its knife, slashing wildly even as Ransom pounded the little hyena in the face with his gun.

Ransom sustained cuts to his cheek, forehead, leg, and the wound to his left shoulder. The three remaining fiends
had regrouped somewhere in the black tunnel beyond the water's edge. It seemed, for the moment, that he owned the water and they owned dry ground. Where the infant might be, dead or alive, was anyone's guess. It flashed through Alastair's brain that one or more of the other may've succumbed to a liking for young human flesh just a little too much.

As the water began to rise, a chilling cold came over Ransom. He'd bled out badly at several of the wounds, particularly the one dealt him by the alpha wolf—the father. It flit through his mind that the cold in his bones could be the onset of trauma, that he could pass out at any moment, and this would leave him victim to the deadly children, and not one of them would show him any mercy whatsoever; in fact, if he passed out, they'd be feeding on his body for a long time. He was as good as dead, as good as Logan.

He gave a momentary thought to Behan.
Where in hell's Behan? Can I count on Ken? Or is he dead as well down here in this hellhole?

He imagined Thom Carmichael's headline in the papers: three of cpd's finest found dead below the fair.
How fitting…

How will Philo Keane get through life without me,
he wondered. Then he thought of the future he will have lost with Jane, of watching Gabby mature, marry and have a child of her own some day. But all such thoughts were dispelled when his instincts took hold on hearing the animals in the dark begin a slow-building keening, a kind of animal mantra, preparing to strike again.

The cane,
he thought.
Need to get to my cane.

He struggled to his feet, stumbled, weaved, his dizziness threatening to take him. But he made it to his cane, and he grabbed hold of it. The firmness of it, the solid shaft and silver handle gave him a grounding that filled him with a sense of something in this nightmare to hold on to. Still, his head swirled, his mind gyrated, and his ears rang out with a silent cry from his soul.

Somehow, Ransom fought off the disorientation and the inner turmoil that wanted to bring him down. He slowly gathered up every ounce of remaining strength and charged into the black, inky passageway where he could hear them but not see the remaining three beasts with long knives. The one who'd leapt into the water afire, while badly burned, had joined his siblings, one of whom had the long hair of a girl, Audra, he wondered. Ransom rushed in at the feral children screaming and madly swinging his cane, the deadly silver wolf's-head hoping to tear into the trio of vultures. At the same time, Ransom blindly fired his gun nonstop, hoping to further even the odds.

He saw winking deadly blades reflected by each gunshot flash, and he felt a glancing blow to the head where another knife struck out at him, then another cut him in the side, and a third jabbed him in the back as the whirlwind of maniacal children dodged his cane and survived his bullets and somehow got past him and were splashing down the tunnel in the water,
escaping
.

He wheeled and reloaded and fired and fired until his gun clicked empty again. Then he went to his knees again, the cane crumbling under his weight, and Alastair Ransom passed out, his blood running the incline and mingling with the two dead adult cannibals in the sewage.

Ransom's last thoughts were of Jane and Gabby and how much time and pleasure of their company he will have lost.
Dead here…cold and alone and dead,
he thought.

“I'm dying in this rat's nest,” he muttered aloud in a final attempt to call out to Behan or anyone within hearing. Ransom then rolled over onto his back, his watch in his hand, thinking
One more thing to do before giving in…passing out…

 

Alastair was unconscious when they found him, his rescuers locating him by the sound of chimes playing the old English tune “Green Sleeves.” When Jane, Gabby, Behan,
and Fenger, and the uniforms got to him, they saw his watch had been opened and thrown toward dry ground.

And in fact the first uniformed police to locate him had followed Logan's original route because he'd heard the music, unsure what it meant. Jane, who'd heard the chimes before, had shouted, “It's him! It's Ransom!”

What they came across after the watch terrified Jane and Gabby, for at first what was left of Jed Logan, everyone took for what was left of Alastair Ransom. All this excitement happened before officers, led by a shaken Ken Behan, pushed ahead, finding Alastair bleeding out. These officers encircled Ransom's inert body half in, half out of the water, with lanterns, and Behan shouted back to the others, “Down here! It's Ransom! He's here!”

Behan had dropped to his knees there in the water, tearful, his nerves shot, seeing the big man bleeding and dying on top of having seen his partner, Logan, butchered like a ham on a spit. “Dr. Fenger! Come quick!”

Everyone getting a first look at Alastair assumed from the blood loss and his position that Ransom was dead, until Ken Behan, soaked and leaning in over Ransom, placed his hands on Alastair and felt life. He erupted with the news: “He's alive and breathing!”

Behan continued shouting for medical help. Other officers had held the civilians, Dr. Fenger, Jane, and Gabby back, but now they burst down the lantern-lit corridor to where Alastair lay soaked in blood and sewage in the rising water. Someone estimated that if he hadn't been found, that he'd've surely drowned in the next few minutes, proclaiming Behan a hero for having turned him over and having gotten his head out of the water when he did—all exaggerations Behan tried to deny. Others waded in and weighed in, the CPD closing ranks for one of their own, and together they heaved their huge cargo onto the dry floor.

Jane took in the fact that two other bodies floated in the water, both shabbily dressed adults, one woman, one man. She mentally reconstructed what had happened here, seeing
that Fenger was doing likewise. She imagined how Alastair had been attacked by the dead couple in the water, and that just before he gave into his blood loss and faintness, Alastair had had presence of mind to open his chiming watch and toss it as far down the corridor as possible as a kind of beacon to others who might come in search of him.

With a great deal of disgust and outrage, Mike O'Malley and other officers worked the other bodies to dry ground, pronouncing both dead, the woman badly burned, gunshot wounds evident in both. The two dead people appeared a wretched pair indeed, from clothing to the lice crawling over them. In a moment, someone produced a huge curved knife with a hilt, the sort of thing one imagined pirates to use. “No telling what else we'll turn up from these two,” said one officer.

A second held up a cleaver and said, “You think Ransom got the Leather Apron here?”

“Ransom always gets his man,” said a third, and this seemed to settle the question.

“You're right. He got 'em,” said Behan to the others. “Inspector Alastair Ransom's killed the Leather Aprons!”