Richard Kadrey - Dead Set

Zoe focused her mind on the sound, on Emmett’s song, and not on her surroundings. With each step the stronger part of her mind, the part that kept her panicky self in check, repeated, I’m not afraid. Dad is waiting for me. Just keep walking. I’m not afraid.

She lost track of the time. The dark never let up, nor did the stink of the place, but something changed ahead. There was faint yellow light around the next turn. She walked as fast as she could, careful not to splash. In a few minutes, Zoe reached one of the rusted iron service doors. It was half open, and when she listened, she could hear Emmett’s song echoing from the passage beyond. Lowering her head to get through the door, she took a tentative step inside the new passage. The light was brighter a few yards ahead. She stepped into the passage and stopped in surprise at what she saw. The air, the bare stone walls, the ancient rotting carpet that ran along the floor, a whole different world from the sewer tunnels. But it was more than the carpet and the light. The place gave off a static charge like it was alive and very old. Zoe started toward the light.

She could breathe through her nose here. The horrid stink of sewer didn’t seem to extend beyond the metal hatch. The bare stone walls were smooth and covered in glyphs, like the ones on the special records in Emmett’s shop. The marks covered the walls down the whole length of the corridor. Water. Snakes. The moon. Black dogs.

The light in the tunnel came from candles held in sconces all along the walls. Wax dripped down the wall like the liquid on stalactites and pooled on the floor. Rats ran ahead of Zoe, zigzagging across the carpet.

The passage ended at a stone staircase that descended at a steep angle to another tunnel below. The gray stone steps looked polished, worn smooth by centuries of use. But who used them? Zoe wondered.

Going down the steps, she wondered if she’d hurt herself without realizing it and thrown herself off balance. Each step she took was more uncomfortable than the last, and more than once she fell as she moved from one step to another. A few steps later, she realized that there was a simple explanation: the staircase was changing as she descended, with each step slightly higher than the one before. By the time she reached the bottom, she had to lower herself over the edge of each step and jump to the one below.

She was in a tunnel that was much larger than any of the others. Its vaulted ceiling towered over her head, lost in the moving shadows cast by the flickering candles set along the walls. Ahead of her was a set of enormous wooden doors, towering almost as high as the tunnel itself. An entrance for giants, she thought. The doors were ajar, so it was easy for her to slip between them. As she stepped through the doors she paused. Emmett’s song was a distant echo ahead of her.

Beyond the doors were a series of dark stone chambers. Each of them was filled with lost trinkets and abandoned junk washed down from the city. Nearby was a pile of broken dolls as big as Zoe’s house. Their tattered faces and glittering black eyes stared blankly at the ancient walls. Scattered throughout the chambers were mountains of rusting bicycles, water-swollen books and porn magazines, snowdrifts of wedding photos and hills of wallets, many open, creating shiny plastic islands of driver’s licenses, credit cards, and school photos of smiling children, now lost and sodden underground.

There was a chamber filled with women’s shoes and one with money-coins pushed to one side and bills to the other, a lost fortune. Enough to last her mother and her for the rest of their lives, Zoe thought, if she could figure out some way to bring it all home with her. Stacks of glittering gold coins lay at her feet and she was tempted to take some, but Emmett’s song was growing fainter, so she moved on.

The next chamber brought her to an abrupt stop. It was divided into separate rooms, each almost as large and packed as the previous chambers. But instead of junk, these rooms held more personal items. In one room were bundles of hair, neatly tied with string and attached to a paper label holding a name and more of the symbols Zoe knew from Emmett’s records. Next to that was a room full of small bottles, each of which contained a single tooth. The teeth, too, were labeled. In another room were stacks of marked vials that each held a drop of blood. In the final chamber were thousands of small, clear bottles. Each bottle was labeled with the word Tears and a name. Zoe stared at Emmett’s awful collection, feeling cold inside. She wondered if Emmett had bothered to add her false tooth to that pile.

Shit. Emmett!

She could barely hear him now. Zoe turned and ran through the rest of the chambers, following the sound of Emmett’s voice. There was little light past the chambers. She blundered in the dark, groping and stumbling along the walls until she came to an underground crossroads, tunnels leading in four directions. She couldn’t hear anything. Emmett had stopped singing.

She didn’t know what to do, which way to go. A wrong decision could waste enough time to let Emmett get away. But standing there forever would accomplish the same thing. Zoe closed her eyes. This wasn’t the time to lose her shit, she thought. She’d come too far for that. She breathed and looked around for clues. As she stared at the ancient stones, the image of Mr. Danvers flickered into her mind. He’d know what to do. He was smart and would figure out some cool science trick to follow Emmett. But she didn’t know enough science for anything that James Bond-like. Did she know anything at all, anything useful? No, she decided, but she had to make a decision, and knew she needed a push. She pulled out Valentine’s compass and held it close to her eyes so she could see where the little pointer settled. It came to a rest pointing west, to her left. That was better than nothing. She started down the left tunnel.

At first she walked very quietly, even covering her mouth and nose in an effort to muffle the sound of her breathing. The tunnel dropped her back into darkness almost as deep as the sewers, but there were candles here and there that kept her from bumping into the walls. There was something else, too. A whisper, like a voice. And maybe a melody. It was Emmett, singing again. Zoe sprinted frantically toward the sound.

The tunnel took sudden sharp turns and there were two-foot blind drops where the candlelight didn’t reach. She fell. She slammed her shoulders into the walls. She twisted her ankle, but she kept running, and Emmett’s singing grew louder with each step. She gulped air and her chest burned from breathing so hard. Her arms and head ached from tension, but she closed in on the sound. She could tell Emmett was just ahead as she rounded a final corner. .

. . And she found herself in a cul-de-sac of bare, rough limestone. A dead end. Emmett’s voice still hung in the air, a dying echo, like the smell of a room that had once held flowers.

Zoe’s legs shook, and it was hard to catch her breath. She touched her fingertips over the walls, feeling the cold, damp stone. There was nothing in the cul-de-sac, no sign that Emmett or anyone else had ever been there. She looked wildly around the floor for footprints, a dropped piece of paper, anything that might show her that she’d gone the right away. There were just murky puddles, stones, and trash-speckled silt in small dunes in the corners. Zoe fell back against the wall.

Lost, she thought. Everything lost. Emmett. Dad. She bit the inside of her cheek and tasted blood. She wasn’t even sure if she could find her way back.

Zoe held up her hands. They were almost black, covered in filth and ragged cuts. Her sneakers and jeans were ripped in a dozen places. She felt empty, as if, in the last few hours, she’d used up everything she was.