Otherwise: The Children’s Crusade
Chapter Nine: Nattahnam
A few hours, when Petey woke again, he saw Chace and Bumper standing awkwardly near the open freight car door and staring outside. The train had stopped.
“Where are we?” he asked as he crawled up to his friends.
“Kansas,” Chace quipped.
“Not!” said Bumper with a knowing grin, though what it was he knew even he couldn’t have told you. Then, taking a chance, he added, “I think it’s . . . Oz?”
The sun, rising behind them, threw long shadows down an embankment to a row of modest-looking homes above which a view spread across a city of low rises to a narrow river crossed by several bridges Petey was sure he had seen somewhere in photographs or movies; bridges that connected the town beneath them to a long, flat, narrow island where a dense, ragged crystal garden of skyscrapers rose toward an almost cloudless sky. It took Petey a moment to recognize among the office high rises and residential towers a particularly elegant, spire-like skyscraper, and another, not far from the first, with a pair of high shoulders at the base of a nob-like observation tower, like the attenuated head on a modernist statue.
The Chrysler Building? The Empire State Building?
“Is that New York City?” he heard himself saying too quickly to realize how silly it must sound. Chace limited himself to an arch look for stating the obvious.
But who cares about that! thought Petey. If this was New York, they’d left the terrors of the night before far behind them: they had escaped! There was nothing to fear, above all no “otherwise” to confuse and humiliate him again. If they were in New York, they were almost home. . . . All they had to do was call their folks. They’d be overjoyed to know the boys hadn’t been killed in the balloon in the storm . . .
Then he saw Chace tapping exasperatedly on his cell.
“There’s still no signal,” he said.
“No signal at all?” Petey asked.
“Nothing,” said Chace. “Nada. Rien. Nicht.” He added, disgustedly: “And my battery’s almost out.”
“Maybe if we get closer to the city . . .”
“Maybe if I grow a router on my elbow!” said Chace.
Petey looked closer at Chace. Was he too beginning to suspect? . . . Well, maybe in that case, he’d be less of a smarty pants about Petey’s “stories”!
Bumper looked from one boy to the other. His mouth opened, but, again, no words came out.
Petey’s bleak thought of the night before returned in full force,
No, he thought furiously. Whatever it is, wherever we are, it’s not that, and we’re not there!
The train started again, and the boys tumbled back into the darkness. They huddled on the burlap bags, each with the same anxious thought: “Where are we?” But each kept the thought to himself; almost afraid to admit to himself that he was asking a question that seemed so absurd. Though it was not absurd to one to one of them.
Half an hour later the train, after sloping down for half a mile, entered a tunnel as damp as it was dark except for dimly lit, widely spaced lamps, and twenty minutes later it emerged on the island near the clutter of skyscrapers Petey had seen across the river. It was eerily quiet. An unlit neon sign welcomed them to “Kolonie Nattahnam, the Stadt that Niemand Schlaft.”
Chace looked sick when he saw the sign.
“What does that mean?” asked Petey.
“It’s a kind of pidgin German,” said Chace. “It means the city that never sleeps.”
Bumper asked, in all innocence, “But why is it in German?”
“I don’t know!” Chace said, despairingly.
A horrible thought lurked at the back of Petey’s mind. It was too awful to look at squarely. But he did say, “’Nattahnam; is ‘Manhattan’ spelled backward.”
“And ‘Tucitcennoc’ is ‘Connecticut,’ and ‘;Nevahwen’ is ‘New Haven,’ and ‘Elay’ is ‘Yale’!” said Chace. “Everything here is backward! Everything is upside down! It’s on its head! It’s inside out!”
“It’s otherwise . . .,” said Petey;
`”Not that again!” Chace shouted.
Suddenly the train staggered to a halt, the boys went quiet, and men’s voices were heard nearby. Someone clanked open the nearest car and got inside. The boys could hear voices muttering hollowly in the car.
The boys traded looks. Petey spoke what they were all thinking: “We need to get out of here, now.”
One at a time, the boys squeezed out the opening, then cautiously climbed down to the asphalt landing. Then they ran, from car to car, dodging the few workmen out in the early morning, to the edge of the rail yard, where, climbing through a torn place in the fence, they sauntered out, playing casual (Bumper was the last out and swaggered like a trouper), to a noisy street near the base of the awe-inspiring eastern end (looking up at it, Petey caught his breath) of what looked, for all the world, like the Brooklyn Bridge – but who knew what they called it here?
Petey had not seen the ruins from the other side of the river. But standing amidst them now, he could only stare at them in a kind of startled wonder.
The boys were at the bottom of a street that ran at an angle north across the city grid. A sign read “Yawdaorb.”
“‘Give my regards to Yawdaorb,’” Chace said, pensively. “Naah, it doesn’t have quite the same ring.”
It had been flanked at one time by rows of moderately sized office and residential towers. Many of them were burnt-out hulks; several looked like they had been blown apart by close-range cannons, or bombed. One of them was stripped of its southern wall, revealing a column of gutted apartments, some of them macabre stage sets of pockmarked bedroom walls, wrecked kitchens, torn wallpaper waving desultorily in the breeze, others with furnishings barely touched; there was a toilet pasted to a wall like a surrealist artist’s joke, doors half open to an eerily inviting darkness, staircases leading up to a precipice of empty sky. Much of the wreckage was weathered and stained, decades, even generations old; some of it was partly overgrown by vines and brush and wild flowers just blossoming in the spring air. The air was scented with the new blossoms, and was strangely silent and still. Petey could hear the calls of birds, some he recognized from Halloway as migrants on their way north for the summer. He thought he saw a rabbit hopping across a narrow alley, but that certainly couldn’t be true. There were almost no people.
“It looks a little like Berlin after the war,” said Petey.
Petey had seen videos, films, photos of that city and other German cities—Dresden, Hamburg—turned into vast waste lands, miles on miles of buildings blasted, gutted, stripped to the ground. This might not be quite as harrowing as that pitiless devastation, but it was too close for comfort.
Paradoxically, cars were parked up and down the streets as in any ordinary city, except they were in styles that had long been out of date—Studebakers, Pontiacs, Ramblers, blocky practical Fords, classic Chevrolets from decades ago—though gleaming new as yesterday. It seemed like a collection of classic cars gathered for a special meet.
Petey saw a young woman looking like she had just walked out of a Hollywood movie from the 1940s, in an elegant, strong-shouldered black suit, a hat perched on her perfectly coiffed head, her cheeks pale as ivory, her lips scarlet. She walked briskly down the opposite sidewalk, her eyes passing across the boys as if she didn’t even see them.
“Heddy Lamarr,” said Chace thoughtfully. “Or maybe Dorothy Lamour.”
“Definitely Heddy Lamarr,” said Petey. “She was a smart cookie.”
He had heard the phrase in one of his mother’s favorite movies from the period.
“Heddy Lamarr,” said Chace wistfully as she walked quickly away, “is definitely on my radar.”
Bumper piped up proudly: “Heddy Lamarr invented radar!”
“Out of the mouths of babes,” said Chace with a groan.
Not having eaten since supper at O’Hara’s, the boys were hungry and thirsty. A block away stood a small squarish building, all white with a little turret at one corner and a sign that read “White Tower,” and they headed over and had a big breakfast for less than ten dollars for all three boys—though this time they were careful not to leave a tip for the surly waiter-host-cook and probably owner who served them.
“What you gentlemen want?” he had asked, with a wide grin and an excessively hearty manner “You eggs like? I eggs got! You coffee like? I coffee not got!”
Since neither of the boys drank coffee, the latter was not a deal killer.
The man’s face expressed as much alarm as joviality; as much suspicion as the desire to make his customers feel welcome.
“May I have waffles?” Bumper had asked politely.
“Waffles?! No waffles! We here no waffles have!” said the waiter-etcetera in a defiant voice, as if the little boy had asked if they served Beluga caviar. “Waffles!” he muttered to himself. “Next thing ask he pancakes, sausage and filet mignon will be! Where he think he is, the Plaza Hotel?” Then he turned back with his strange grin to the boys: “But eggs scrambled we got, best in Nattahnam!”
So Bumper had the scrambled eggs, like the other boys. (When Petey had asked for eggs over easy, the warning look in the waiter’s eye had been enough to change his mind. It was, clearly, scrambled or the highway.)
They left after paying, the waiter pretending to laugh as he peered at the bills they gave him—putting them up to the light, sniffing them, seeming to weigh them with a strained cackle, and scratching his unshaven cheeks before sticking them with a resigned mutter and sigh into his cash register and giving the boys their change.
“Better safe than sorry be!” he said. “Never nickel plugged take! Bite the gold you that anyone gives! Not into mouth gift horse look, maybe, but give him a ride fail not!” And with a snarling smile he sent them off.
Once back on the street, Petey considered the waiter’s weird mixture of joviality and temper, to say nothing of his weird syntax (a word he had just learned in English class): it felt like a mask behind which the man tried to hide an almost uncontrollable suspicion, a little like the excessive fear the young girl at O’Hara’s had shown. As if there were something about the boys that put them on their guard, even frightened them. There was the inexplicable violence of the soldiers the night before, and the rifle aimed at them from the back of the truck, not just in cruel fun but more than half in earnest. There was something about the boys that made them seem dangerous to the people here. Even terrifying. The only people who hadn’t shown any fear of them had been the prisoners in Nevahwen and the cool young woman in the black suit.
“Why are they afraid of us?” Petey asked.
“Are they?” asked Bumper incredulously.
Petey gave his reasons.
“I think you’re right,” Chace said thoughtfully, then he turned to the youngest of the three. “Or maybe they’re just afraid of Bumper.”
Bumper’s eyes turned very round. He was used to being afraid (there was his mean teacher Miss Brooker, and the bully in the playground Billy Brown, and the pit bull down the street from his house that always seemed to be waiting for him when he walked home from school, and that was even before the nightmares he had most nights), but he had never ever been the cause of somebody else’s fear; not, anyway, that he knew of. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that. Actually, it felt kind of good, though in a creepy sort of way he felt almost ashamed of.
“Whatever the reason,” said Chace, with a shrug, and bringing Bumper back to reality, “they sure haven’t told me.”
Chapter Ten: The Burning Library
One of the buildings was of a particular elegance in its ruin, a low shell of concrete with a Greco-Roman façade and a broad row of steps flanked by a pair of stone lions lying at rest and gazing across the avenue before them as if across the savannah of their rule. A long-defaced name appeared above a large, black entrance door at the back of the entrance portico. The door was half ajar.
It was the lions that captured Petey’s imagination.
“Let’s look inside,” he suggested, and, without waiting for the others, he strode up the steps and pulled open the door wide enough to enter. It stuck first but gave way after a few shoves.
What met his eyes was a shock: a wide, closed-in space with smoke-blackened walls open to the sky and filled with a burnt wreckage of cabinets, chairs, tables, counters, shelves, racks, curious-looking electronic readers, little brass lamps with green shades, and an acre or more of the burnt remains of . . . books? Yes, books.
Petey, whose favorite way to spend a lazy Sunday afternoon was to browse through his mother’s book collection, gave a little gasp at the sight of piles on piles of books destroyed by fire, it looked, deliberately. He walked to the nearest heap of ashes and picked up a half-burnt volume, then another: a book of logarithms, a history of snails, a catalog of women’s hats, a manual of astronomy with charred photographs of planets, comets, the Crab nebula, the Andromeda galaxy. Then he saw a book he recognized from his childhood. It was an old, battered edition of The Secret Garden, the first book he had read on his own many years ago. Fire had eaten most of the outer half of the pages, but he could still read the inside halves and see portions of the original illustrations.
Chace and Bumper had joined him. Something about the place instilled silence and a certain solemnity.
“I’ve never seen so many books in one place,” said Chace in a whisper, who, to put it mildly, was not as bookish as Petey. Even he was impressed.
Bumper, who had never read an actual book (all his lessons were on his laptop) simply asked, “Why are there so many ashes?”
Neither of the other boys felt the need to answer.
“They burnt . . . everything,” Petey finally said, in a voice that sounded strange even to him. The feelings that had been set off inside him he had never felt before: after the shock there was a feeling of hurt that was almost personal, as though someone had deliberately destroyed something that was important to him, then there was a feeling of grief almost immediately followed by a feeling of resentment—or maybe all of these feelings struck him at the same time, chaotically, or tight and aching, like a knot. It was confusing. But then there was something almost frightening: a feeling of rage, as at the desecration of something sacred.
He felt a confused urge to “do” something about this, but there was nothing he could do that could possibly meet how he felt. Maybe scream up at the sky that was visible above them through the long-burnt out roof, but what good would that do? He remembered the soldiers of last night: what if there were soldiers here? The last thing he wanted to do was call attention to himself. And his friends would think he had gone crazy. Which, he thought, might be true. He felt, in those few minutes facing those thousands of books in ashes, as if he had gone a little out of his mind. But the small corner of his mind that always seemed to stay sane no matter what the circumstances held him back.
All three boys began poking through the ruined volumes.
“I read this on my laptop,” said Bumper. It was one of the Winnie the Pooh books, burnt almost to the spine but with the cover intact.
Even Chace found something to read: it was a manual for building a sailboat; sailing off the coast of Halloway had recently become his favorite hobby (Petey had teased him about why, but Chace had never recovered any memory of the adventure in Biestia, to Petey’s frustration).
Soon all three were immersed even in half-destroyed books, piecing together what they could and guessing at what was missing. You could hear the distant song of a bird, but otherwise not a pin drop in the silence of the ruined library . . .
“Who you be?”
Petey looked up from the charred pages of The Secret Garden. Someone was standing on the other side of the ash heap. A girl? A boy? It was hard to tell. Whoever it was seemed near his age but was slender and tall, with short hair, pale high cheeks, and sloe eyes that combined curiosity and suspicion in equal measure while boring a hole in him with their stare. Petey had never felt so self-conscious about his orange hair; he wanted nothing more than to burn it off his head right then and there. He was almost afraid to say anything: his voice would certainly break and make him look like a complete idiot!
It was a girl for sure, though wearing boy’s clothes (only a girl could have that effect on him!), yet she seemed both wildly exotic and deeply familiar.
“We’re from north of here,” said Chace. “Far north.”
North of the moon, Petey thought, uneasily, and south of the sun.
“We were riding on a balloon and it got caught in a storm and it blew us far from home and now we’re here,” Bumper piped up in a single breath.
The girl looked at Petey as if for confirmation.
“That’s pretty much it,” said Chace, butting in and giving the girl a long stare.
But she seemed dubious.
“What here you be doing?”
“Well, I guess we’re trying to read the books,” said Petey, carefully controlling his voice. “Whatever we can of them . . .”
“Books you read?” she said as if scandalized.
“Yes,” said Petey, surprised at her tone. “What’s so strange about that?”
The girl looked worriedly at them.
“Then you not know?”
“Know what?”
She looked scornfully at them, these fools who pretended to be so appallingly ignorant not to know what everyone knew, and had known for a very long time.
“That no one for the last seventy-eight years to read books has been allowed!”
Petey stared at the girl.
“What are you talking about?” Chace demanded. “What are you doing here if books, even burnt to ashes, are forbidden?”
“Guardian I be, my job that no one the remains of the books left from the Great Fire of ’58 reads is mine, when all of the libraries of the kolonie destroyed were in a single glorious night,” she said, too quickly, almost mechanically.
“But why were there any books left at all,” Chace asked, “if books are so dangerous?”
“As a reminder of the destruction that if you exposed are to them you awaits. As reminder and warning. Lucky you are I in time you caught,” she added, archly. “If the next grade had you found, you in quarantine before you the rest of the city contaminated you would be put. Or, if quarantine too full, as generally it be,” she continued, gloomily, “exterminated.”
“So,” asked Petey, after a grim pause, “why don’t you?”
“My job to warn the ignorant it be. And you all very ignorant be. Not know the Edicts of Forty-seven!”
“The forty-seven edicts?”
“No! Of 1947! Do you really absolutely nothing know?”
He guessed he didn’t, Petey thought. At least nothing important.
“Never the Kolonie Stadtneuen von Yesrejwen either you never have heard I suppose? Or our Fürleiter of the Beloved Name? Or the mob of traitors and rebels that be called . . .?”
Three blank faces met her enraged visage.
“Called . . .?” she repeated, still angrier.
Bumper suddenly brightened.
“Wagensvolk?” he said, remembering the billboard the night before.
The girl could barely stifle a laugh but returned to her Valkyrie fury so fast Petey thought at first he hadn’t seen the lapse.
“Swine! I have you now got! No one in Nattahnam could live and know, or pretend to know, so much of nothing. You will me follow.”
And she turned toward the break in the back wall, between two small signs, scorched and weathered, that read “320.51” and “410.37,” remnants of a long-obsolete system of organizing books in libraries, as Petey knew.
“Why should we?” Petey blurted out, pre-empting Chace by a fraction of a second.
“Right,” said Chace, a little more dryly. “What makes you the boss?”
The girl turned toward them. Petey did a double take: she was holding what looked like a very old-fashioned pistol, coal black yet as shiny as new. Chace looked at it
searchingly, as though he recognized it.
“This boss me makes,” she said simply.
She motioned ahead of her, and the boys looked at each other. They were not about to test the girl’s willingness to use the weapon, so they walked ahead of her through the break in the wall out to a small one-time park with dead trees and gravel walkways lined with long-unused benches. A pair of crows hopped beside them, gave them a wary look, then cawed as they flapped up to a long dead limb. Petey glanced back at the girl, who held the pistol close to her side as if she wanted the boys to see it but no one else.
“To the end of the park go,” she said.
They did so.
This avenue was considerably busier than the one in front of the burned-out library. There was a modest but steady stream of cars, a few trucks, an occasional bus. There was even an old-fashioned trolley that reminded Petey vaguely of the crooked yellow trolley he had ridden years ago to a strange world called Otherwise. But this trolley looked brand new, shining bright with a fresh coat of paint of gray and black and just off the factory line. It ran slickly on the gleaming rails and clanged its bell as it passed. The cars and trucks and busses shared the old-fashioned style Petey had noticed before (including a few “Wagensvolk” beetles, which looked charmingly out of place, though, strangely, all of the vehicles, of whatever make, were painted either black or gray). The pedestrians, a steady stream of them, seemed even more old-time: the men in boxy suits with fedoras and short, wide ties, a few in gaiters, the women in sensible shoes and skirt suits and hats, some quite fancy. It felt to Petey like a film set from decades ago. The pedestrians moved briskly, but, curiously, they seemed not only in a hurry but nervous, keeping their eyes to themselves and walking just a little faster than seemed necessary.
Suddenly a black van with opaque windows drove up a few yards away and stopped. Three men in black masks jumped out and grabbed a man who had just walked past Petey. Petey looked at the man; nothing seemed to distinguish him from the rest, except for one detail: a small tattoo of an anchor on the side of the man’s neck. Petey heard the girl suck in her breath.
The masked men grabbed and pulled to the ground the man, who seemed too startled to react—he crumbled and went limp the moment they seized him, as if he had been waiting for just this thing to happen and realized immediately there was no hope of escape. Petey saw all of this in a flash as the man collapsed under their grip and let them haul him into the back of the van, his face white as chalk and limp with terror, slam the door, and drive off. He had not shouted, or cried for help, or waxed indignant. He just went down like a sack of potatoes, and, like a sack of potatoes, was shoved into the back of the van. Petey saw the bottom of his shoes just before the van door was slammed shut.
No one on the street stopped or even seemed to take notice. If anything, they walked on even faster than before. The girl watched impassively.
“Street trash collecting,” she said very loudly, with a withering sneer.
Bumper stared, shocked.
“This is America!” he said. “You can’t do that here!”
The girl looked down at the little boy.
“What this ‘America’? This Acirema, outre-mer of Deutschland be.”
“This is the United States!” Bumper insisted.
“The United States decades ago was destryed,” said the girl. “Everybody that knows! What wrong with you be? But I forget—you boys anything do not know!”
And she laughed loud.
“Well, you are going now to learn.”
She pointed ahead.
“March!”
With her free hand, she pointed across the avenue.
“It’s a Luger,” Chace muttered to Petey while the girl wasn’t looking.
“What?”
“Her pistol. It’s a classic Nazi gun.”
A shrill noise cut him off. The traffic on the avenue halted, and the girl directed the boys, a black whistle between her teeth. Petey saw the frozen looks of the drivers and their passengers, deliberately not looking at the boys and girl as they crossed their lines of sight. Even the pedestrians had stopped on the sidewalk and down the street at the intersections; some in mid-stride. They froze and made no sign of seeing the four, the sole creatures moving anywhere within hearing, it seemed, of the sound that had warned them.
After the four reached the other side, the girl blew the whistle again and the traffic and pedestrians resumed, as if nothing had stopped them in the first place. The girl deposited the whistle in her pocket.
“Where to now?” Bumper asked, politely.
The girl raised her hand as if to strike him, and Bumper cowered, with his hand over his head. She stopped and instead just motioned toward the nearest intersection, where pedestrians were again moving in a steady stream. The people on the sidewalk skittered out of their way; hurrying, over-focused, as though pretending they did not see the boys and the bullying, peremptory girl.
At the intersection, she motioned left, and they walked past a block of small businesses serving the neighborhood: two small bars, a Mexican restaurant next to a pizza parlor, a large tavern, an old-fashioned penny arcade across a small alley, then a drug store, a beauty salon and wig shop, a nail parlor, then a news stand with newspapers headlined “Fürleiter Today in Kolonie,” “FL to Our City Grace,” “Nattahnam to Belovéd Name: ‘Hello, Fürleiter!’” and the like, followed by a post office . . .
Above the last, an American flag hung at the top of a tall pole. There was little wind, so the flag hung limp, like a ghost at the top of the pole.
Bumper’s favorite book was his brother’s Boy Scout Manual, and his favorite section of it was devoted to national and official flags and banners of the world, in colorful pictures, from Afghanistan to Zambia, from the various militaries to civilian organizations like the Kiwanis Club and the Knights of Columbus, the Red Cross, or even the Boy Scouts itself, each of which had its own flag to symbolize who they were and their special mission. Bumper especially enjoyed thinking about the curious symbolism of the shapes and colors that appeared on each flag: each flag seemed to speak its own special language. And anyway there was something about a flag waving and shifting in the wind that always gave him a little thrill of pleasure. And so, naturally, Bumper raised his head to look just as a breath of wind lifted the flag briefly above him.
“Hey!” Bumper cried. “There’s something wrong with that flag.”
The others stopped. Petey and Chace looked up at the flag. For some reason, the girl left them alone, though she watched them closely.
The flag didn’t move for a moment, and they were about to proceed when a second zephyr caught the flag and it gave a single, lazy flap.
Petey first noticed that the number of the stars was wrong.
“It’s missing Hawaii and Alaska,” said Chace, who had seen the same thing.
Exactly! The stars were lined up in a perfect rectangle, not the ragged rows Petey was used to.
But there was more still that was strange.
“The background’s the wrong color,” Petey said.
“Only forty-eight stars,” said Chace, “on the red, white . . . and black?”
“They aren’t stars,” said Bumper, squinting hard up at the flag as it gave another desultory flap. “They look like little crosses . . . But they’re crooked.”
Chace looked long and hard at the flag.
Petey could barely see it: it was almost noon, and the flag was now almost exactly between him and the sun.
Don’ tell me, he thought, with sudden dread. I don’t want to know . . .
“You’re right, Bumper,” Chace said. “They aren’t stars.” He paused. “They’re swastikas.”
“Are we ready now on to move?” the girl said, it seemed to Petey, almost gently.
Subdued and sobered, the boys moved on.
Chapter Eleven: Going Underground
They had been walking for hours. The streets were quieter and emptier than those between the bridge and the hollowed-out hulk of a library. They were surrounded by a hard, flat, long-deserted urban grid bearing a gigantic sculpture garden of gutted warehouses, abandoned factories, sheds and overseers’ huts, tall smokeless cylindrical chimneys like the turrets of defeated castles, workshops behind walls of filthy glass in lattices of soot and iron, with a bare minimum of bars and diners (all closed, many also boarded up) to serve the workers who used to toil there, storm-fenced lots of abandoned cars and superannuated buses and weed-grown parking lots; the whole industrial cityscape bathed in stark, indifferent light, without shadow, hiding place or pity. To be seen here was to be naked indeed. The overwhelming impulse was to hide, hide anywhere—but there was nowhere to hide.
So Petey felt. But the girl marched them inexorably on, seemingly oblivious of the deepening weariness and increasing anxiety of her charges.
They passed a boarded-up subway entrance apparently for a stop that been decommissioned and abandoned long ago. Petey could see the stop’s name through the debris at the entrance: “Aeslehc Htron.” Neither it nor the name spelled backward (“North Chelsea”) meant anything to him.
An alley opened a few yards beyond, and the girl ordered the boys to turn into it. A quarter of a block down the alley, she ordered them to stop. It was odd, since the alley was lined with the walls of two deserted factories, of sooty and weathered brick (one of them had an ancient sign painted across it: “Peter Piper’s Shoes and Boots: Neat for the Ladies, Great for the Gents!”), with broad surfaces of mullioned windows, many with broken or missing glass, beginning yards above street level, but no entrances or exits on either side within half a block.
The boys had learned to keep their opinions to themselves before their little termagant, or were just too tired to speak, though they looked the same question at her: Why are we stopping here, of all places?
She pointed down.
They were standing on a metal flat that opened to a basement beneath the sidewalk.
“Well, if move you do not,” she said, with an arch chuckle she immediately suppressed, “we might here all night have to stay.”
The sun was heading west with more urgency than Petey, for one, felt was strictly necessary. His throat was dry. He was afraid of this city, even aside from their menacing escort: the idea of being stranded in the open here all night, even with his best friends at his side, was making him sweaty under the tee-shirt he had worn for the fair—a place and time that seemed already eons ago and as far away as the Webb telescope could see; in another universe . . .
The three boys stepped off the flat, and the girl, pulling at a ring near the curb, heaved up the hinged metal plank. There was a thick metal-web gate underneath, which she also pulled up, revealing a ladder that went straight down to a lightless cellar—or perhaps it just went down eternally, to the churning fiery ball at the center of the earth.
But that was unlikely: the smell that rose was a sickly sweet mixture of diesel exhaust, rotten fruit, old newspapers, sweaty shoes, and sewer gas, and though warmer than the outer air, not alarmingly so.
The boys looked questioningly at the girl.
“A move on get! Down!” she said, exasperatedly, looking up and down the alley, then pointed to Chace. “First you.”
Petey thought this was an extremely strange place for a police station or place of detention (in fact, they had passed a “Poliz Egallivtsew” a few blocks past the post office, but the girl had hastened them past it).
Chace lowered himself down the ladder, followed by Bumper, who whimpered at first: he was afraid of dark, confined places, but he held his breath and boldly descended on “encouragement” from the girl. Petey followed the ten-year-old into the lightless, airless cellar, and the girl descended last, cleverly closing first the metal gate, then the metal flat while still covering the boys with her Luger. Petey would have admired her dexterity (especially given his own embarrassing clumsiness), along with her precocious coolness and determination, under almost any other circumstances.
“Don’t of running away even to think,” came the girl’s preternaturally calm voice to them in the darkness.
“Wouldn’t dream of it, ma’am,” same Chace’s voice somewhere off to Petey’s left.
“Good,” said the girl. “Let us here wait until our eyes adjust.”
A few minutes later, Petey found that, almost miraculously, he began to see obscure shapes, larger and smaller, around him—the figures of his two friends and of the girl he found himself squinting at—and tried to note details, though all he saw were blobs of moving shadows, darkness against darkness, hallucinatorily, such that he couldn’t tell what he was seeing and what imagining. Then, in the distance, he thought he saw a small line of light along the floor ahead of them. It seemed to grow brighter as he watched it.
After a few more minutes, the girl spoke.
“Do you all the light see?” she said.
So it was real.
“Yes,” the boys said in ragged response.
“Toward it begin to walk. But slowly. There things be . . .”
There was the sound of someone tripping and Bumper howled.
“Like that!” said the girl. “You all right be?” she asked.
“I guess so,” Bumper whimpered as Petey heard him getting back up.
“Keep to go,” said the girl. “But careful be.”
Petey had instinctively raised his arms and walked ahead, cautiously feeling his way with his feet.
As they approached the line of light near the floor, Petey heard rather than saw the girl walk up to it. He could tell it was she because the sound of her footsteps was noticeably lighter than that of the more heavy-footed boys.
“Halt,” she said. Then she knocked quietly on what seemed to be a door: three short knocks followed by two long ones, a pattern she repeated.
The door slowly opened. A head appeared, followed by a pair of broad shoulders silhouetted against a dim light.
“Yram?” the apparition asked.
“Yes,” said the girl. “In us let.”
The door opened wider and Petey could see a boy, about the age of Chace, with black hair and beady eyes and the shoulders of a quarterback.
“You early back,” he said somewhat reproachfully but still not letting them in. “Who they?” He squinted suspiciously at the boys. “They safe?”
“To Ruhtra I take them,” replied Yram. “New they be.”
“New?” the boy said skeptically.
“Yes,” she said. She gave the boys a curiously sympathetic look. “About us they know not. Know nothing they. From . . . elsewhere they be. Say anymore I cannot.”
It felt strange to be talked about as though they weren’t right there under the speakers’ noses. But that wasn’t what surprised Petey the most. This was nothing like what he expected. There was something very strange going on here—even stranger than he and his friends had experienced since crashing the balloon the day before.
“Well . . . ,” said the boy reluctantly, who was evidently some sort of guard. “In come.”
The strangeness deepened when Petey passed through the doorway with Chace and Bumper and the girl Yram and he saw what was on the other side.
They stood near the top of a flight of stairs leading down to a dimly lit abandoned subway station—no doubt the one with the debris-filled entrance they had passed on the street above—but it was filled with people—little people.
“Hey,” said Bumper. “look at all the kids!”
And so they were. There were children of all sizes and ages: from little ones as young as five or six to tall, almost adult teenagers. Children of different nationalities and backgrounds—brown, black, pink, white, red, Hispanic, Latin, Asian, Nordic, Italian, Slavic, Arab, Indian, gypsy, Eskimo, you name it—boys and girls from every corner of the earth, it seemed, all in one, poorly lit place. They didn’t seem terribly crowded either, despite their number—on the contrary, they were casually spaced out, some standing, alone or in small groups, others sitting or lying about. There was bedding and even seats,
comfortable chairs, a small sofa or two, little tables, and other furnishings, cabinets, bookcases filled with books, a dresser, a chiffonier, a vanity table or two, a desk (used as a dining table), a card table with a chessboard drawn on the surface; everything casually but neatly arranged along the old subway landing platforms and long-unused tracks into the tunnels vanishing into darkness; even up and down the stairways leading to the landing where the boys stood, and farther to the upper station levels and the street. It all seemed surprisingly neat and organized. The children had clearly made a home of it. They all looked up at the boys on the landing above them with curiosity but little surprise. Yram was obviously someone they knew and trusted.
The big question was what they were all doing there? And who was Yram if she wasn’t part of the “Poliz” or one of the black-masked abductors terrorizing people above ground? And why had she brought them here while playing the heavy, a role she seemed clearly glad to drop as soon as she got past the boy at the door, though she remained on her guard around the boys?
The boys had no time to compare notes with each other since they were immediately the focus of curiosity of the dozens of subway children.
A little girl, sitting sedately nearby on the top step and holding a doll, had twisted around and looked straight up at Petey.
“Where from you be?” she asked.
Petey was at first at a loss. He wasn’t quite sure where he was, and so where he was from was not an easy question to answer.
“I’m from Halloway,” said Bumper, bumping in, as was his wont.
“She didn’t ask you,” Chace reprimanded him.
“From elsewhere they be,” said Yram, using the same word she had used for the guard. “From here they be not.”
“From here either I wish sometimes I was not,” said the little girl thoughtfully. “Be elsewhere nice?” she asked, again looking up at Petey.
“It can be,” Petey said. “When it wants to be.”
“To go to elsewhere then I would like,” said the girl, turning back to her doll. “To go to elsewhere too would you not like? Now do not cry! To elsewhere you I will take. I
promise!”
Petey’s spine tingled. They were in Otherwise—now he was certain of it.
“Me follow,” said Yram, and she led the boys up a short flight of stairs to the old entrance to the landing with its row of turn-stile gates. The girl approached a gate and pushed. The “teeth” to prevent exiting had been removed so she and the boys could go through easily. Along one side of the area beyond was an empty booth for the attendant, with long-used token holders still half-filled with copper tokens, a lumpy cash register, a lonely-looking chair, a bulletin board with faded notes, reminders, warnings, most long unreadable except for a faded sign at that top that read: “Physical or verbal abuse of employees of the Nattahnam ETA will TOLERATED BE NICHT. Perpetrators to IMPRISONMENT WITHOUT TRIAL subject will be.”
Petey felt a chill when he read the sign.
“Why not just shoot them,” said Chace, “and get it over with?”
“Because that people some hope gives,” said the girl, for the first time completely dropping the bullying tone she had used above ground. “One of the crueler traits of the regime it be.”
“The regime?” asked Petey.
“Those who think us they own.”
“Does someone own me?” asked Bumper, completely perplexed.
Chace looked like he was tempted to answer, but gallantly held his tongue.
“Me follow,” the girl said again.
The subway station was one of several joined by a labyrinth of tunnels; this must have been a juncture of several lines, Petey thought. The tunnels were badly lit by jury-rigged lamps, so it was difficult to see. The floors were of cement and sometimes rose and fell in graduated arcs; the walls were for the most part lined with white, dirty tiles decorated with old posters for toothpaste, with exaggeratedly large pictures of bright teeth between luridly red lips, Wagensvolk automobiles as in the billboard they had seen above the train, old movies with titles like “The Traitors of Yesrejwen” and “Heidi to Berlin Goes,” with heavily drawn pictures of actors the boys had never seen before. One sign kept appearing over and over again, three words in all capitals, white against a black background – “WORK MAKE FREE.”
“It should be ‘Work makes free,” said Chace. “‘F’ for grammar. Though they got the syntax right.”
The girl looked at him strangely, then shrugged and led them onward.
The sign reminded Petey of something he had read in a book he had found in his mother’s collection years before – the history of a war fought long before his birth. The sign in the book was in a photograph; it had been in German and was placed, in rather gaudy lettering, above the gates of a camp where people had been murdered – Jews (Petey had thought of his bear-like, funny friend Hackney in English class—why in the world would anyone want to harm him, or his nice, friendly family he had visited so many times?), gypsies, Slavs, homosexuals (Petey didn’t really know any of the last, though Tommy Farrow was sometimes called a “gypsy” by his mother – as in “The gypsies must have put you in my bed, because I sure didn’t”)—had been systematically, mechanically, remorselessly slaughtered, including old men and women and children, out of a pointless, vindictive, lunatic hatred, and not only that, but in the millions . . .
The book contained descriptions and photographs of what had been found behind the gate with the mocking sign above it.
It had made a profound impression on the boy. More than that: it left a scar, though one he did not regret. The scars reality leaves can keep you from becoming human, or they can provide the steps toward becoming human.
The sight of these horrors—horrors that had really happened, by real people against real people—had bewildered him. His mind could not grasp them. How could anything like this ever happen? How could any human being do such a thing to another human being? Or even imagine it? . . . Because, for people to have done these things, they must first have imagined them. Right? Or perhaps not? Could they have done them without imagining them, without actually thinking them? . . . It was an unsolvable puzzle. And yet one that, at some point, had to be solved . . .
The emotions he had felt at the time, contemplating the book and its descriptions and photographs, had formed into a knot—a feeling of mental and emotional paralysis—and they came back now with a strange force.
Why now? he thought. Why here?
“Where are we going?” Bumper asked innocently, taking Petey away from his painful thoughts.
“Silence!” said the girl in a harsh whisper. “Unless you want to your friends and yourself to kill, and, though probably less could you care, me.”
Bumper looked like he wanted to reassure the girl that he really did not want to get her killed, but Chace gave him a murderous look and he said nothing.
The girl took the boys down one tunnel after another in a twisting maze that soon became a labyrinth. Every so often Petey could hear what sounded like the voices of children in the distance, maybe from the abandoned station they had left, maybe from elsewhere. Otherwise the only sound was the echoes of their footsteps.
The tunnels were empty except for, here and there, an occasional roll of homeless blanket or huddled heap of rags from which emerged a suspicious-looking urchin until Yram gave a signal half-hidden and too hurried for Petey to see exactly what it was, that acted as a password, and the urchins slumped back under their camouflage, evidently guards like the stunted quarterback that had challenged them earlier.
Around one obscure corner, under a lamp that had gone dark decades ago, there was a narrow metal door that looked like it went into a utility closet. Yram stopped and gave the same tattoo of knocks she had used earlier.
The door opened, seemingly on its own, to complete darkness, and the girl led them inside.
“Touch the right-hand wall and follow,” she ordered. “And anything you hear on your left ignore.”
Which was helpful advice, because, as Petey walked carefully through the darkness after the metal door closed silently behind them, he could hear water running far below along his left, and smelled something vile, as though the wall there had fallen away to a running sewer. Fortunately, this only lasted a minute or two (though a minute in such conditions can feel like a little eternity). The right-hand wall turned a hard right, and he heard the girl tap again on a door, which opened to a dim haze of light Petey saw her silhouetted against. She turned back to the boys.
“In come,” she said. There was a new softness in her voice. “Here safe you will be.”
It struck Petey with the force of a hammer: all this time she hadn’t been endangering them; she had been protecting them.
_____
Christopher Bernard is a prize-winning author of both poetry and fiction. The two earlier stories in the “Otherwise” series are If You Ride A Crooked Trolley . . . and The Judgment Of Biestia (winner of the Independent Press Award in Preteen Fiction and short-listed for the K M Anthru International Literature Award).
