Underground

“I did! It was as big as a car! It had a whole man in its mouth—like when a rattlesnake tries to swallow an egg.”

“Where did you see it?”

“Uh… Under the Square.”

“You can’t get under the Square.”

“Yeah, you can! Behind the Pioneer Building there’s a grate down in the alley. You just lift it up and go in the hole!”

“When did you see the snake there?”

“I can’t remember! Leave me alone!” He shoved at me and bolted past my shoulder.

I could have stopped him, but he needed to salvage some pride and I didn’t mind letting him think he’d gotten away with it. I thought I knew where to find him later.

I turned back to Quinton and Tall Grass, who was fighting his way back to his feet.

“Get away,” Grass snapped.

“You go

“I’m fine.”

“You were pretty hysterical…”

He glared at Quinton and stared around. Seeing me with the hat still in one hand, he darted over and snatched it from me. “That’s Je

“You said it was Bear’s hat.”

Tall Grass looked trapped, his eyes shifting restlessly between us. Its not.

“C’mon, Grass,” Quinton went on. “We all know it was Bear’s hat. You said you saw him get eaten by a monster.”

“I didn’t say that!”

“Yes, you did. We want to stop it. We want to find the thing that ate Je

“I didn’t see the S-s — … I didn’t see it eat her!” Grass wailed. He leaned against the nearest wall and buried his face in the cap in his hands. “We were sleeping and it came in the dark. Like rushing water. And she made a noise and then… then I felt something cold and it smelled rotten and stinking. I opened my eyes and saw it swimming away through the walls. It swam through rock! All I had left was this stupid, stupid hat! And tonight I saw John Bear. Bear’s ghost. Walking through the bricks and he stopped and looked at me and said, ‘You keep the hat.’ Then he left. He left me with this hat. He cursed me with it.” Even with his voice muffled by the fur of the hat, I could hear him sobbing, and his shoulders shook with the spasms.

“Its not the hat, Grass. Believe me, that’s not what got either of them killed,” Quinton said. “Bear wouldn’t curse anyone. He just wanted to make sure his things went to the right people. You know how Bear was.”

Tall Grass shivered and raised his head. He didn’t look at us, but he spoke to us nonetheless, stuttering as he caught his breath. “The z-zeqwa… took her. S-s—”

“We know what it was. We want to find it and find out why it came.”

“I don’t know,” Grass whispered fiercely. “If someone sent it to eat Je

“We’ll find out. You go find a fire to sleep near tonight. Don’t sleep in the bricks. Don’t sleep in the skid at all. Hear me?”

Tall Grass nodded mutely, still dazed at his own outburst of grief and anger. We walked him up to Occidental Park and left him with a scowling Sandy while we went on to try to find the grate that led under Pioneer Square.

“Why would he say that?” I asked. “That someone sent it?”

Quinton shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe he believes it came hunting her.”

I frowned and let that tumble in my head.

We discovered a grille loose in the alley floor between the Seattle Mystery Bookshop and the back of the Pioneer block. A steel frame and hinge marked where it had been embedded at one time, but now had been twisted out of its frame and laid back on top of the hole. To my eyes, the whole area was clogged with cold silver mist, the grating outlined and blazing in neon red and yellow—not the most comfortable combination.

Quinton glanced around as if making a mental note of the place. “I never knew there was anything under this.”

“Me, either.” I bent and pulled on the grille. It swung up and revealed a narrow vault, barely one person wide, that led to a tu

At the bottom of the stair was a very short corridor that logic told me dove under the edge of the sidewalk in front of the Pioneer Building. And ended abruptly in a wall.

“Dead end,” I said, but there was something wrong about the wall…

I let everything normal slide away from me as I stared at the wall, moving deeper into the Grey until the wall was a black shape crazed with red and yellow energy threads and wisps of pale gray. I crouched down and inspected the gently waving pale threads.

As my face drew near, I felt the thin breeze that animated them, thick with age and mud, salt water, and things gone rotten. The threads weren’t just gray in color, they were Grey in substance. I grabbed onto the web of it and pulled it apart.

A hole had been chewed through the real wall, leaving a narrow tu

“I guess its time to get dirty,” I said.

He looked nervous and his eyes shifted from a spot just above my head to the rift in the wall that had been hidden by the Grey threads. I realized he was looking where my head would be if I were still standing—he couldn’t quite see me in the gloom as I crouched near the energy grid of the Grey, just as I wasn’t seeing him normally, either. I wondered if this was how ghosts saw us, but I doubted it, since most of them don’t seem to exist as close to the grid as I did.

I pushed my way back up to the world as I normally saw it: the normal, living world, slightly misty, shot with gleams of energy and ghostlight and the watery currents of time and memory.

Quinton jumped a little and adjusted his gaze down to me. “Where did you go?”

“Not far, just far enough to find this. Want to see what’s at the other end?”

“Yes, and no. It gives me a creepy feeling.”

“Can’t say I’m thrilled with it myself, but Lass said he saw a ‘snake’ down here, and the camouflage is the same material I found before.”

Quinton took off his hat, rolled it into a tube, stuffed it into a pocket, and started to climb into the hole.

“Hey,” I whispered, feeling a little oppressed by the place—even a touch scared—and protective of my companion. “I see better in this stuff. I should go first.” I didn’t want to, but it was smarter. If there was something otherworldly waiting at the end of the tu

I crawled into the hole, getting unhappy signals from my shoulder and knee that no amount of working out would compensate for stupidity. I took a deep breath and crept forward into the silver-ski

The rough bore was wide enough for us to pass through without squeezing, but the dank, dark feel of it and the smell of watery decay ahead lent our journey the feeling that we were crawling through the closing grip of a stone fist. I could hear the gentle slosh of water ahead, echoing as if we were approaching a subterranean swimming pool. A low moan, like distant wind, came and went in the hollow tone ahead and sent a shiver over my skin that left goose bumps in its wake that had nothing to do with the cold.

I could see a hard line ahead at knee level—just a micron of harsh yellow energy against the Grey-swathed blackness of the tu