John Saul: The Manhattan Hunt Club

Time had finally lost its meaning. Weeks could have passed. Or months. Not days, though, for the memories of what his life had once been were fading into the fog that filled his mind. Not years, either, for the memories still had shape and texture and color and smell.

A tree.

Not just any tree, but the walnut tree behind the house in which he grew up. When he was little, the tree was huge, its lowest limbs branching off so far up the trunk that his daddy had to hold him up to touch them. When he got big enough, he climbed up the rough-barked trunk into its spreading canopy-even built a tree house once, where he could hide on a lazy summer afternoon. The sun filtered through the dome of leaves, and the whole world seemed to glow with the faintest tinge of pale green.

In the cypress hedge that surrounded the yard, hundreds of sparrows roosted at sunset, their rustling almost inaudible until his dog-a little black mutt named Cinder-went racing up and down, shattering the quiet with her high-pitched yap. The birds would explode from the hedge in a rush that sounded like wind and looked like a swirl of autumn leaves. The sparrows would wheel in the sky, etched against its darkening blue, and slowly settle back to the hedge, only to be flushed again a moment later.

Those were the memories that were still brightest in his mind, for they were the oldest, and though he himself wasn't old, his mind was already playing the tricks of the aged. Why could he clearly remember that tree from nearly twenty years ago, but barely recall the last room he'd lived in?

Was it because he didn't want to remember that room?

As he paused in the gloom that surrounded him now, vague outlines re-created themselves in his mind. A tiny space almost filled by a single sagging bed, a metal table with a chipped enameled surface. The stairs leading to it reeked of piss, partially masked by the stink of stale cigarette smoke. Not that he'd worried much about it-he had lived in rooms like that before. Then one day he left the room and never went back. He didn't care-he couldn't pay the rent anyway, and the bastard landlord who lived in the crummy apartment in the basement probably would have changed the locks in a couple of days.

Not much to remember after that.

He'd wandered around the streets for a while, and that hadn't been too bad. At least he didn't have to waste any money on rent. But then it started getting cold, and once or twice he'd gone to one of the shelters. Not the one out on the island-what the fuck was the name of it? Like some department store from a long time ago.

Wards. That was it-Wards Island.

He hadn't been about to go out there. Not that he figured it would be any worse than the places he'd seen since he followed Big Ted down into Grand Central.

They'd been hanging around the food joints on the lower level when a couple of transit cops started looking at them funny. "Come on," Big Ted muttered, and he'd followed him to the platform down by Track 42.

On the other side of the track there was a weird jumble of walls and pipes and ladders. Half the walls seemed to be falling down, and most of the ladders didn't look like they led anywhere. Big Ted jumped off the platform, crossed the track, and scaled a ladder on the opposite side. He hesitated, then heard someone yelling, and didn't wait to find out what they wanted. He quickly followed Ted across the track and up the ladder and was just able to keep up as the other man ducked through a door.

Ted led him through a couple of rooms, then climbed up on some pipes and started working his way into the darkness. He still heard shouting behind them, and it drove him on, following Big Ted.

At first it was kind of fun-sort of like an adventure. He figured he'd hang with Big Ted for a couple of days, then maybe go somewhere else. Maybe even get out of the city. But a couple of days later it started snowing, and at least it was warm down in the tunnels.

Well, at least it wasn't freezing cold down there.

If you were careful, you could use the men's room around the corner from the Oyster Bar, if you didn't stay too long and the transit cops weren't feeling too mean. But after he barely got away when they busted Big Ted, he spent more time in the tunnels than upstairs.

He got used to it. It wasn't nearly as dark as it seemed at first. There were more lights than he'd thought, and after a while he even grew accustomed to the noise. "Like the gentle rolling of ocean surf," Annie Thompson had called it in her gentle drawl that two years on the streets of New York hadn't hardened. "Puts you to sleep just like you were on the beach at Hilton Head." He didn't believe she'd ever lived in Hilton Head, but then, she probably wouldn't have believed he'd grown up in California. It didn't matter.

All that mattered was that they were both still alive.

Or what passed for alive. Most of the time there wasn't much difference between night and day, unless you were under one of the grates that opened up into a park or something, and for the last couple of days-maybe even a week- he'd been staying away from the grates.

The grates, and the subway stations, and the train stations, and the culverts, and the mouths of the tunnels. None of it was safe anymore.

None of it.

Not any friends anymore, either.

A few days ago, maybe a week, he'd had friends. Annie Thompson, and Ike, and that girl-the one whose name he couldn't remember. Didn't matter no more anyway, once they started coming after him.

"They."

The thing was, he didn't know who "they" were. Up until the craziness started, he'd thought "they" were his friends.

But then one day when he left the tunnels, he snatched a purse. It was real easy-he'd watched Big Ted do it lots of times. The woman he'd snatched it from hadn't even tried to hang on to it.

She didn't even yell for help.

A couple of hours later, still on the outside, he ran into Annie Thompson. She'd been right there in the subway station where he made the snatch, and saw it all. But instead of asking him how much money he'd gotten or to split it with her, which he might even have done, she told him off. "You crazy? What did you want to do that for?" She kept on talking, but he didn't listen-he was too busy looking at a girl who'd just come out of the big church on Amsterdam Avenue, and wondering what it would be like to talk to her. Not touch her or anything like that. Just talk to her. So he'd pretty much ignored Annie until he ran into her later-he couldn't remember exactly when-and she'd warned him. "Better get out," she said. "You really think you could get away with that? Now they're comin‘ after you."

He hadn't believed her until the next time he tried to get to the surface through one of the subway stations and some of Ike's friends had shown him their knives.

He could tell by the look in their eyes they weren't kidding.

He'd been on the run ever since.

And he'd been going deeper and deeper, climbing down ladders whenever he found them, crawling through drainpipes he could barely fit into, creeping on his belly through slimy passages so tight that if they hadn't been slick with scum, he wouldn't have been able to make it at all.

Now he lay on a ledge above a passageway that was so dark, if he shut off his flashlight he couldn't see his hand in front of his eyes. The batteries were dying, and even if they hadn't been, he couldn't risk the dimming glow of the flashlight giving him away.

He heard something moving in the dark, then felt whatever it was skitter across his hand.