As I grew up, I realized that was never the case, the world was a twenty-four-hour place. But at that moment, inexplicably, I was walking through the imagined starkness of childhood night, pulling my coat tighter about me. It was late, without even a sign of the morning. I tried to keep my balance against the wind, which seemed to blow straight down from above the tops of the skyscrapers that surrounded me on all sides. No clouds that night, so all of the earth’s heat just evaporated out into space.
There was no help around when my lucky 1979 Susan B. decided to jump out of my pocket and make a run for it. NO one but me considered that night a fit one to be out, apparently. The coin skittered along the gutter and slipped down a storm drain with a brief flash of reflected light. So I got down on my hands and knees and stuck my arm down in the gap between the grate and the curb. Just far enough to knock the coin off its ledge. Great.
I tested the grimy plate of metal with my fingers, found it loose. Checking around to make sure that no one was watching, I pulled the heavy grating aside and dropped down into the closet-sized area under the street. The moon tracked a cold white path down one of the walls, making accumulated muck glisten. I retrieved the Susan B. and prepared to climb up, but found no handholds that weren’t covered with some kind of slippery moss.
When I stopped splashing around in order to think of how I could possibly get back to the surface, I started hearing things, echoes from very far away down the system of cobblestone pipes. Just the roar of traffic passing along the river, I figured, and start walking in that direction, fairly certain the passage had much easier ways out than the one I had been attempting.
The farther I got, however, the less the noises sounded like traffic. Whatever it was, it started coming toward me in a strange rhythm, like breakers on the shore, or a half-heard choir practice. There was a warm air flowing past me as well, and was that light ahead? I was nearing the way out, I reasoned, and the wind reverberating endlessly off the slick stone down here could configure into any manner of sounds. I kept going, but I realized I had unconsciously lightened my footsteps, minimizing the splashing sounds. I turned a corner, and finally saw where the light was coming from. My feet stopped moving, my breath refused to leave my throat.
I had heard that in times of either sense deprivation or sense overload, the mind can create any manner of things to justify what it is (or isn’t) seeing. I tell myself this is what happened just then. I felt as if a circuit had blown just behind my eyes, or an air rifle had puffed a cloud of dust into them. I stumbled back around the corner, trying not to choke on my own screams. I staggered back the way I had come, no longer caring how much noise I made.
My fevered brain had too much time to think on the way back to the storm drain. What had been going on in that vast open space beyond the archway? The area had been far too large to actually support the buildings overhead, and the light that shone directly down was not the color or quality of any I had ever seen. And those things down below, on the floor of the chamber! They had somehow resembled men, but their joints were terribly wrong, sprawled as you would expect the victim of a tumble down a long flight of stairs might look. But the joyous, chilling sounds they made! The twisted figures sand and writhed deliriously around the base of a huge obsidian statue, whose features I tried not to recall, and which sat back in some hollowed recess, out of the darkened light.
I found the grate easily enough. I hadn’t changed direction much on my way through the drain. It must have been sheer force of will that made me lift myself back up to the street by my fingertips. I ran blindly, hearing unexplainable things, sounds that I somehow knew had been there all along, if only I had paid attention. The sounds of that rhythmic chanting pulsed up from under every manhole cover, ricocheted off the mirrored face of every buildings, making the city itself creak and groan under its own weight, like an enormous ghost ship.
I finally threw myself down, face first, in a decrepit city park and clung to the unmown grass for dear life. In my broken mind now, absolutely nothing was sure. There was even the distinct possibility that the very earth itself would betray me, flip upside down like a spinning top and throw me off into the empty spaces between the stars.
I tried desperately to drive the one recurring, maddening thought out of my head. Were my overloading eyes simply playing tricks, or, at the last second, had that colossal black statue somehow leaned its shiny, oblong head forward into the light? Had it really inclined its head and peered at me on the ledge, the way a cat turns one predatory eye toward a mousehole? I told myself, over and over and over, that I couldn’t be sure.
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