Robert Walker - Shadows in the White City

Logan began screaming this but it was unintelligible by now, his clothing and body covered in licking flames. His burning form created a ball of light and fire that illuminated the grime-covered faces of his killers. Five pairs of eyes watched his body finally fall facedown, snuffing the flames in his fall. The broken lantern had wheeled away and once more the corridor was thrown into darkness.

Amid the pitch black crept people wading through the water toward Logan’s body. The man who had wielded the knife, followed by a woman in rags, and she followed by three voracious children of varying ages. The woman and her children attacked Logan’s remains, taking whatever clothing and jewelry that might be useful, ripping away burnt and useless clothing, finally getting down to the bare back and gleefully, as in a ritual of pleasure, all of them began stabbing repeatedly.

With Logan beyond dead, and with the initial excitement of the kill over, the cannibals began cutting away fleshy portions of Jedidiah Logan’s corpse. Logan was the largest prey the family had ever brought down…so far.

Inspector Ken Behan had not gotten sixty yards down his tunnel when he decided to hell with it, that he was going no farther until he could bring a small army of men with him, and that what Alastair and Logan had decided with little to no input from him was in effect madness. Besides, he thought he’d heard something vibrating through the walls of his tunnel, sounds like those of a man crying out in pain.

In his head, he tried to understand how so muffled a sound could reverberate through rock walls here in the curiously damp, black hole he stood in. The damn lantern he had was threatening to go out as well. Some kind of malfunction. This alone seemed good enough excuse to return to the museum, and why not?

Behan thought of his wife and kids; imagined what their lives would be without him. He started back for the light at the end of the tunnel, the one that marked his entry.

As he neared the place where he had begun, he saw the guard looking down the corridor at him, and it made him feel as if he were in an endless, bottomless shaft that could turn into a labyrinth inside of which, if a man became lost, he might never surface. He panicked for a moment, thinking, what if the guard, for whatever reason, is going to close and lock that door against me?

He felt a clinging, clawing feeling in his chest, and his skin began to prickle, and his head felt fuzzy-dizzy as a midnight drunk, as if he might faint. What if I were to faint here? Wake up with five beasties chomping away at my flesh?

“Let me the hell outta here!” he shouted now, running back toward the door and the guard, not caring if the museum man called him a coward or not.

Behan found himself rushing, tripping headlong down the shaft the way he’d come. The odor of sewage, earth, and mold still dizzying, filling his nostrils and brain, Behan fell headfirst into the light the other side of the door.

“Are you all right?” asked his guide, helping him to his feet.

“I…I must have a condition.”

“Yes, and you left the lamp down in there. Shall I fetch it, Inspector?”

“You do that. I’m going for men and dogs.”

“Whatever did you see, sir?”

“I…I’m not sure but there was movement, and I heard strange noises. Someone is down in there and it could be-”

“Not Leather Apron? Really?”

“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.