throwing your weight around, and I don’t doubt you could punch my fat old head into next week. But you got a whole trailer of mean sonofabitches behind you, and worse, this site is watched by Homeland Security. We got big projects going on. Important projects. Not to mention an unholy hell’s load of dynamite down there. You go knocking guys around here and they’ll throw your ass in an unlabeled hole for the rest of your years. That what you want?”
Homeland Security? Jesus. Things have really changed since 9/11.
Mookie just shakes his head.
“Then let’s just cut this short and say goodbye. Goodbye, Mikey Pearl.”
“Mookie.”
“Whatever, kid. Get outta here.”
Kid . The old lump of bearded fat called him “kid”. Mookie’s a couple years shy of his fiftieth birthday, and even still, some senior citizen Sandhog calling him “kid” gets under his skin, lays eggs there, eggs that hatch and whose larvae burrow deep.
The ghost of Grampop is somewhere here, laughing at him.
He can still get down there. Into the tunnel. Mookie’s always got a bolthole and long ago he made sure to carve himself a couple doors into the length of the tunnel – doors that’ll one day need to be sealed up before the gates open and the water comes rushing in, but that’s three years off, easy.
It’s just a long fucking walk. He was hoping to circumvent the trip. He’s tired.
But, what else is he gonna do?
Once more, descent awaits.
It’s eight or nine hours of crawling around through too-tight tunnels and ducking his stubbly dome underneath jagged rock that Mookie finally comes to one of his bolthole doors. It’s hidden. It has to be – elsewise any goblin or cult freak or amateur explorer could find it. This one behind a crumpled old refrigerator (the Shallows of the Underworld end up as home to lots of junk and trash, the debris of a humanity that doesn’t care where its waste goes long as it’s out of sight). Mookie has to hunker down, shimmy the fridge out, then squeeze through.
Then, twenty feet down, a big rectangle of schist. Which he cut through using a gas-powered cut-off saw about four years ago.
Mookie steps into the tunnel. He turns off his flashlight – the space is well-lit and his eyes take a moment to adjust.
The tunnel’s big enough to drive a tractor trailer through. It’s cool in here. Up above, strings of sodium lights hang. Everything in a yellow glow, like morning light through a windshield smeared with tree pollen.
Here, the distant sound of the city. The gung-gung-gung of subway trains. The rumble-and-hiss of steam somewhere behind and above the rock. The white noise of a million machines and devices: cars, trucks, boats, cranes, drills, all forming a meaningless mumbling hum. Mookie finds it all oddly comforting.
This isn’t the Water Tunnel proper. That’s further down – he’s got boltholes that’ll take him right into the tunnel, but getting there would take him another half-a-day’s walk and right now there’s just no need.
It isn’t long before he gets to another hole, this one ringed by lights. Bundles of cables and pipes disappear down over the craggy lip and into the pit. The pit sits ringed by a metal handrail. Mookie steps up. Looks down.
Down, down, way the fuck down.
The skyscrapers in the city above do as their name suggests: they are physical objects that scrape the sky.
This is the opposite. This is negative space, a carved out channel of rock and stone that’s over four hundred million years old – it doesn’t scrape the sky, but like a needle plunged too deep, it perforates the membrane between this world and the next. Or, it did, when they first dug it out. Now it’s walled off, fortified in ways not easily seen or understood.
But Mookie remembers this shaft.
This isn’t how a lot of the Sandhogs get to the Tunnel #3 dig now – no, there’s a much bigger hole down in Battery Park, a straight shot eight hundred feet into the earth where
Homeland Security? Jesus. Things have really changed since 9/11.
Mookie just shakes his head.
“Then let’s just cut this short and say goodbye. Goodbye, Mikey Pearl.”
“Mookie.”
“Whatever, kid. Get outta here.”
Kid . The old lump of bearded fat called him “kid”. Mookie’s a couple years shy of his fiftieth birthday, and even still, some senior citizen Sandhog calling him “kid” gets under his skin, lays eggs there, eggs that hatch and whose larvae burrow deep.
The ghost of Grampop is somewhere here, laughing at him.
He can still get down there. Into the tunnel. Mookie’s always got a bolthole and long ago he made sure to carve himself a couple doors into the length of the tunnel – doors that’ll one day need to be sealed up before the gates open and the water comes rushing in, but that’s three years off, easy.
It’s just a long fucking walk. He was hoping to circumvent the trip. He’s tired.
But, what else is he gonna do?
Once more, descent awaits.
It’s eight or nine hours of crawling around through too-tight tunnels and ducking his stubbly dome underneath jagged rock that Mookie finally comes to one of his bolthole doors. It’s hidden. It has to be – elsewise any goblin or cult freak or amateur explorer could find it. This one behind a crumpled old refrigerator (the Shallows of the Underworld end up as home to lots of junk and trash, the debris of a humanity that doesn’t care where its waste goes long as it’s out of sight). Mookie has to hunker down, shimmy the fridge out, then squeeze through.
Then, twenty feet down, a big rectangle of schist. Which he cut through using a gas-powered cut-off saw about four years ago.
Mookie steps into the tunnel. He turns off his flashlight – the space is well-lit and his eyes take a moment to adjust.
The tunnel’s big enough to drive a tractor trailer through. It’s cool in here. Up above, strings of sodium lights hang. Everything in a yellow glow, like morning light through a windshield smeared with tree pollen.
Here, the distant sound of the city. The gung-gung-gung of subway trains. The rumble-and-hiss of steam somewhere behind and above the rock. The white noise of a million machines and devices: cars, trucks, boats, cranes, drills, all forming a meaningless mumbling hum. Mookie finds it all oddly comforting.
This isn’t the Water Tunnel proper. That’s further down – he’s got boltholes that’ll take him right into the tunnel, but getting there would take him another half-a-day’s walk and right now there’s just no need.
It isn’t long before he gets to another hole, this one ringed by lights. Bundles of cables and pipes disappear down over the craggy lip and into the pit. The pit sits ringed by a metal handrail. Mookie steps up. Looks down.
Down, down, way the fuck down.
The skyscrapers in the city above do as their name suggests: they are physical objects that scrape the sky.
This is the opposite. This is negative space, a carved out channel of rock and stone that’s over four hundred million years old – it doesn’t scrape the sky, but like a needle plunged too deep, it perforates the membrane between this world and the next. Or, it did, when they first dug it out. Now it’s walled off, fortified in ways not easily seen or understood.
But Mookie remembers this shaft.
This isn’t how a lot of the Sandhogs get to the Tunnel #3 dig now – no, there’s a much bigger hole down in Battery Park, a straight shot eight hundred feet into the earth where
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