Beneath the Surface by Simon Strantzas

Author:Simon Strantzas [Strantzas, Simon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dark Regions Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

YOU ARE HERE

“You can’t go down there,” the woman said, her red scarf wrapped twice around her throat. Gibbons couldn’t help but stare at the ruddy-faced apparition. Had she finally come back for him? “They locked all the doors because the place was filled with bums.” The last word, unnecessarily emphasized, cut through his fog. It was not Beverly speaking to him; she was still gone. He turned his back to the woman and waited for her to leave, but she lingered, her eyes burrowing into him. If it wasn’t for the storm, she might have stayed there forever. “Find somewhere else to sleep,” she said and he heard her shoes crunch sharply away through the icy snow.

He waited until he was sure she had gone before trying the door. The metal bar was colder than he’d expected, and it wouldn’t budge for him. Gibbons stuffed his hands beneath his arms to warm them and stepped with hunched shoulders into the snow.

It was as though Heaven itself hated him. It poured down day-after-day of biting snow, blanketing the streets with ice until Gibbons could no longer tell them apart. No doubt his assigned case worker was waiting several ice-encrusted blocks away, practicing shaking her head with that uncaring look of hers and mouthing the same sentences he’d heard countless times before: “Gibbons, you’ve got to pull yourself together;” or perhaps, “the only thing you’ve lost is you.” Nothing she said made a difference though. He knew he couldn’t go back, not until he made sense of everything. But the only way to do that was to figure out where to start, and he hadn’t been able to do that until he accidentally heard the two men in line at the Good Shepherd Mission. After that, everything became clear to him.

He recognized neither man -- both were sagging, their faces sallow and pale, and they blinked repeatedly as though unused to even the brightness of the low-wattage lights. Gibbons paid them little attention, too lost in his thoughts of Beverly, until they mentioned the underground path. Then his mind crawled out of itself and he leaned surreptitiously closer.

The path had been sealed off for years, its every entrance boarded and locked. Trapped between the office buildings above and the subway below, it stretched beneath the heart of the city. No one had officially set foot in its narrow corridors since it had been hastily sealed, and yet the rumor persisted that somewhere one of the entrances had been missed by the crew who had done the work, neglected after an accident took one of the workers’ lives. If the story was true, though -- and Gibbons knew many who believed it -- no one had managed to find that needle in the city’s haystack of alleys.

Yet somehow the two men in line before him had discovered it. A loose door, a shattered window, Gibbons couldn’t be sure, but they spoke as if they’d been inside, discussing the barest of light and the captured heat from the power system of the subway system below.

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