Beasts of New York

Chapter 7 - The Kingdom Beneath

Descent

Patch and White passed through the little hole in the ancient brick wall, skidded down a steep dirt tunnel so narrow it scraped against Patch’s back and sides, and emerged into empty and absolute darkness. Only the hollow echo of dripping water indicated that they were in some kind of vast cave.

After a few steps forward Patch came to a despairing halt. He hadn’t understood that this was what the underworld was like. His eyes were useless, and his nose scarcely less so: the ground on which they stood was damp with rotting sludge, and the reek of decay was overwhelming. For a moment he thought his mission hopeless. He would never be able to find anything down in this opaque blackness. He was already lost, he was so exhausted he was stumbling, and his dozen battle-wounds were hurting more and more.

Patch shook his head, breathed deeply, took a few more breaths to steady himself and adjust to the darkness. He slowly came to realize there was more to this dark air than stagnant warmth. He felt and smelled a cool and sighing breeze, faint but unmistakable, a sickly zephyr imbued with a strange and bitter scent that made him shudder. It wasn’t much of a trail, but it was something.

He turned to his left and began to walk blindly into that breath of alien air. White followed. He could hear her quick and nervous breaths. His instincts told him to turn back, run, escape. He ignored them.

‘Are you sure this will take us to Silver?’ White asked, and her voice was trembling. Patch didn’t reply. ‘Because this feels like absolute madness!’

‘You don’t have to come. It’s okay if you want to leave. I’ll find a way.’

A long time seemed to pass before White answered, ‘No. I’ll stay.’

Patch hesitated, asked, ‘Why?’

At first he didn’t think she was going to answer. Then she said, quietly, ‘My whole life, other squirrels have kept away from me like I was a rat. You don’t know what that’s like. When you left my tree, that whole day, I kept thinking, this will never happen again, I’ll never find another squirrel who will talk to me, my whole life. You’re my only friend. If I go back I’ll never have a friend again. You don’t know what that’s like. It’s better to die.’

They walked on in silence. Their paws squished against the mire on the ground, and Patch guessed from the resulting echoes that this tunnel was remarkably spacious, big enough for a large dog. He had the feeling they were descending. They encountered and detoured around collapsed bricks, rotting coils of fallen tree-roots, piled rat skeletons, rusting hulks of twisted metal. It was soon eerily easy to believe he and White had been stumbling blindly through this tunnel forever, that all his other memories were nothing more than soon-forgotten dreams.

The only good news was that everything here smelled old and long untouched. The rat guardians at the entrance must have come from outside. This ancient tunnel was entirely abandoned, not used as a highway by rats or anything else.

Had Coyote somehow known what would happen, when he had shown Patch this tunnel? Or – had Coyote arranged for it to happen? That strange and terrifying animal had helped Patch, had healed his leg, but to what end? Patch thought of what Sniffer had said: ‘This wasn’t my idea. It was the eldest, he came to me, he showed me the necessity.’ Patch wondered what that meant, and who the eldest was.

He didn’t know. But he knew he didn’t trust Coyote.

Most of all, though, more than anything, he had to try to rescue his mother.

‘It smells different here,’ White said eventually.

She was right. The wind they followed was unchanged, the wind that curled up through the tunnel like a cold and rasping breath, but the stagnant air through which the wind moved had grown thick with moisture, and the muck beneath Patch’s paws became damp and then wet. He began to skid as much as walk. Then the tunnel floor ended abruptly, and Patch’s forepaw broke through a thick layer of congealed slime and into a pool of water as warm as blood. It wasn’t a puddle. It was a pit. White and Patch walked back and forth across the width of the tunnel – which could have fit a half-dozen squirrels nose to tail – and found no bridge across the stagnant water.