Wizard of the Pigeons by Megan Lindholm

Author:Megan Lindholm
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers

CHAPTER NINE

The bus ride did not warm him. When he disembarked in the general area of home, he was still deeply chilled. The city seesawed around him. His feet knew where to take him, but nothing looked familiar. He focused himself on the streets determinedly. He belonged here. He had worked a long time to belong here. He knew this place, knew every damn square foot of it. He knew more about Seattle than people that had lived here fifty years. It couldn’t turn its back on him now. He willed it to be alive, in the frightening and invigorating way Cassie had opened him to. But the buildings remained faceless, mere stone and mortar and wood and glass. When his magic had fled, it had taken all magic with it.

He stamped his feet a little harder on the sidewalks, to waken his numbed toes and stir the city beneath him. These sidewalks were hollow. He knew that. How many residents of Seattle knew that the sidewalks were hollow, with enough space beneath them for folk to walk around? Well, it was true. The hollow sidewalks came into being after the fire of 1889, as a very indirect result of it.

After the great fire, when the whole damned downtown area burned in less than seven hours, the city decided to rebuild itself in brick. No more wood buildings to invite another tragedy like that. And shortly after that, the city decided to raise the streets and suspend the plumbing mains under them. It was all the fault of those new-fangled flush toilets. They had worked fine, on an individual basis. Folks just piped the stuff out into the garden patch or over the property lines. But when there got to be a lot of them, and folks joined up to funnel the stuff into big pipes that went out into the bay, problems cropped up. The system worked just fine, as long as the tide was going out. But when the tide came in, the sea paid back a dividend to all the residents in the lower parts of town. The easy solution was to raise the streets and put the plumbing mains under the new, higher streets. The sewage backup would be solved! But by the time the city got around to raising the streets, a lot of businesses had already constructed new buildings. So you had buildings that had their ground-floor store front windows eight to forty feet below street level. People had to climb up ladders to cross the streets. Horses fell from the streets onto the sidewalks below. In 1891 alone, there were seventeen deaths due to falls from the street to the sidewalks. It was not a good town to get drunk in.

So, of course, the city finally had to raise the sidewalks as well. This changed a lot of ground floor space into cellars. That’s how the underground shopping began. For years the people of Seattle strolled along on the original sidewalks, their way lit by bottle-glass skylights set into the sidewalks above.

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