Edison’s tail wagged in approval, brown eyes glued to his hand.
Joe tossed the ball in an arc across the old sidings, and Edison ran after it in a streak of gold. The dog returned with it, and he threw it again. He liked watching the glowing ball careen off tracks and roll under parked train cars, liked to see Edison having fun.
Edison bounded about, abandoning himself to every moment. Joe couldn’t remember a time when the same could be said about him. Maybe Edison could teach him that, too.
Ball in his mouth, the dog loped back again. This time he didn’t drop it at Joe’s feet. Instead, he dropped the wet ball in his hand, a sign that he’d lost interest in playing. Joe tucked it into his jacket pocket and wiped his hand on his pants.
Above, tons of rock hung between him and the sky. It was very different from his beginnings — he’d spent his childhood with only the thin metal skin of a travel trailer separating him from the elements, and often not even that. Whenever he could, he’d slept outside in a sleeping bag. He’d gazed at the night sky from fields across the Midwest, sleeping with quiet stars above and the circus animals moving in their cages around him for company, everyone waiting for the next performance. Now he, too, was trapped in a cage, because his brain, once his greatest ally, had betrayed him.
Enough. No self-pity.
Joe adjusted his night-vision goggles and turned toward home, Edison ranging ahead. The world glowed an eerie green, the best the goggles had to offer. He found them more reassuring than a flashlight. The white beam felt out of place down here, more unnatural than night-vision green.
He’d bought Edison canine night-vision goggles, too. Not hard to find. War dogs used them, but Edison didn’t like them. He’d wear them with a weary air of resignation if Joe made him, but Joe didn’t force the issue. Edison’s eyes were good in the dark. Turned out, dogs could see almost as well in darkness as cats. The tapetum lucidum at the back of a dog’s eye refracted the light back through the retina, like a cat’s or a bat’s.
Joe swept his gaze along the tunnel. This one was cut and cover. It had been built by tearing up the street above, cutting the tunnel, then covering the top back up and replacing the street on top. Most of the tunnels this high were cut and cover.
He liked them better than the deep-bore tunnels because they had more room on the sides to get out of the way of trains. Deep-bore tunnels were drilled with a big round drill. They were barely large enough for the train cars. He and Edison could be spread across the walls like tomato paste if they got caught there off guard at the wrong time. Even there, if he flattened himself against the side, he’d survive a passing train. Edison would be safe, too, so long as he didn’t panic, and Edison was never one to panic.
Counting each step, Joe marched toward home. He used the short strides he’d developed for walking in the tunnels. Instead of measuring his stride by the length of his legs, he measured it by the distance between train ties. It had felt awkward at first, but now it was his natural gait down here. When he went back to the stations and shops topside, it took him a few minutes to switch back to the same gait as everyone else.
Edison stopped to sniff a foul-smelling object on the ground, probably a dead rat.
“Don’t roll in that!” Joe called.
Edison had, before. He often brought the odors of dead rats or rotten food into their home, and Joe had to toss him in the giant claw-foot tub and scrub him clean with Balenciaga soap. Edison didn’t like the scent any more than Joe liked the stench of dead rats, but since Joe had to do most of his shopping at the luxury stores in Grand Central Terminal, Edison had to take what he could get.
The yellow dog gave him a hurt expression, as if he would never think of coating himself with the stink of a dead rat, and trotted to stand next to Joe’s leg. Joe bent and ruffled the animal’s soft ears. “Good boy.”
The dog stayed close to his leg as Joe walked toward home. He’d warned Edison about the dangers of the third rail, but Joe didn’t like to take chances and kept him to heel when he could.
They arrived at a round metal door faced with an ornate pattern molded into the Victorian-era steel. On it, Joe tapped his own addition — a high-tech electronic keypad. Nineteenth-century security combined with twenty-first-century technology kept people, and the occasional floodwaters, out of the most personal part of his domain. He entered an eight-digit code on the keypad. At the green light, he inserted an old-fashioned key from his key ring, turned it, and pushed open the heavy door.
He took off his night-vision glasses and entered a large tunnel floored with wooden planks long worn gray with dust and soot and lit by amber bulbs strung along the ceiling. The bulbs looked old enough to have come from the workshop of the original Edison — Thomas himself.
His Edison bounded ahead. Joe followed along the planks toward home. As always, he paused before entering his house, amazed that he lived there.
The amber lights illuminated the neatly painted facade of a full-size Victorian house. Surrounded by stone, it looked as if someone had chiseled a house-shaped cavern into the schist, then teleported a building into it. He blinked, but the house was still there when he opened his eyes. Even now, his mind had trouble fathoming it. It was completely incongruous, but it was real. A three-story Victorian house built deep underground.
Nearly a century before, the eccentric lead engineer on the construction of Grand Central Terminal had been granted the weirdest perk Joe had ever heard of — a house buried in the tunnels far below Grand Central Terminal, deeded to his family in perpetuity, combined with access to all the tunnels in the system. It was his key ring that Joe carried on his belt, and the keys on it had opened every underground door that he had come across.
The engineer and his wife had raised their children in this fantastical house in the world beneath, taking them up in the elevator each day for school and outings. A few articles about their unusual living situation had appeared in turn-of-the-century newspapers, and then the world had moved on and forgotten.
The engineer’s children had opted for lives aboveground. Following generations had used the family house only for parties. Joe’s ex-girlfriend Celeste Gallo and her twin brother, Leandro, Joe’s college roommate and old friend, were the final heirs to the house. Ever since Leandro had told him about it, Joe had itched to see it, but had never found time until he became trapped in New York not far from the house’s entrance.
Tonight, Joe gazed at the house. The wooden facade glowed bright sulfur-yellow with clean white trim and gingerbread accents picked out in brick red. It resembled the famous painted ladies lining Alamo Square in San Francisco, except that this house stood a hundred feet below where it ought to.
Buried treasure.
He could see why Leandro had fought so hard to keep it after September 11, when the government had tried to have it closed down as a security risk. But Leandro’s great-grandfather’s contract had proved ironclad, and the house had stayed in Gallo hands.
He was just grateful that he’d persuaded Celeste, with whom he shared a complicated romantic history, to let him live here. It hadn’t been easy, and Leandro had fought it. Leandro had claimed, “Digging Joe into a bigger hole is just enabling him.” Leandro had told Joe that what he really needed was a good kick in the pants. That would cure his agoraphobia, and he could fly back to his life in California.
That wasn’t going to be possible.
Celeste had won in the end because, like everyone else, Leandro couldn’t deny her anything she wanted. So, the house was Joe’s.
Edison stood in front of the front door, wagging his tail. He was ready to sack out. So was Joe.