“I know its pretty cold out here so I’m going to keep this part short and get us in under the street in just a minute. A lot of the area we’re going to be walking through is condemned and of course it’s all private property, so you’ll want to stay close to me and not wander off. Its perfectly safe so long as you stay on the wooden walkways and cleared paths—our rats are all union here and they don’t like to cross any lines, but they do occasionally pick off stragglers, so your best bet is to stay with the group and… are there any children here…? No? Oh, well… usually we call ‘em bait, but you adults will have to take your chances.”
That got a laugh.
Our guide, whose name we’d missed, talked briefly about the totem pole—stolen by the city fathers on a trip to Alaska, burned in the fire, and replaced at the cost of the old pole plus the new one—and the pergola, which had been built as a trolley stop, knocked down by a runaway truck and rebuilt.
“Unfortunately,” our guide went on, “when the repaired pergola was reinstalled, the city felt that the area needed more support and poured tons of concrete down into the space below to shore up the street corner—didn’t know there was anything down there did you? But there is. The classiest underground restroom you will never see. Like the pergola, it was built for the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition of 1909 and was billed as the most luxurious ‘subterranean comfort station’ in the world at the time. Marble floors, murals, a shoe shine station, a barber, even a tailor’s stall to make repairs to your clothes. People came from all over the world to inspect our restroom and build subterranean comfort stations of their own.”
One of the tourists held up a hand and asked if the comfort station was still there.
Our guide shook his head. “Yes, but unfortunately it’s now sealed behind that load of cement the city poured in. These large, decorative lamp standards around the Square are actually ventilation shafts for the comfort station down below—just like the uprights in the pergola. And speaking of down below, let’s get in there.”
The group trailed the tall guide across the Square and street and down First Avenue half a block, the guide talking at each pause about whatever the group happened to be standing near. The pace was slow enough and the distance short enough that I had no difficulty keeping up, in spite of my complaining knee.
The guide opened a gate and led us all down a flight of metal-framed stairs and through a metal door to an area of brick arches similar to the place where Quinton and I had found the vampire attacking Jay. We continued under the sidewalk on a walkway of creaking boards, past piles of discarded junk, while our guide filled us in on the history of the underground and how it came to be.
We followed him north, through a hole in the wall, to where a sudden burst of light came down from work lights strung near the ceiling. A lot of broken furniture, pipes, cans, and other strange objects leaned in the far corner. We took a dogleg turn and came out into an L-shaped room with a door into a building on the inside corner. Flickering light came in through the ceiling and a once-fancy sign with lightbulb sockets and blue and white enamel stood canted in a corner spelling out “SAM’S____________________” something; the second half was missing. The guide stood in the middle of the room under the odd light.
I felt much colder in that area and got an unpleasant sensation of something crawling on my skin. I edged a little farther into the room, putting my back to the stone wall near the door in the corner, but couldn’t escape from the feeling of dread. The room was fairly boiling with Grey and bright with blazing energy lines in hot yellow and blue, but I couldn’t see an immediate source for my discomfort.
“We’re now directly under the corner of Yesler and First,” the guide began.
So this was the “worst corner” in the underground according to the Indians, where a native shaman had driven away a pack of ghosts. Maybe that was an explanation for the energy levels and my disquiet.
“You’re standing now at the original street level of Seattle. Now, back in the 1860s through 1880s this was all mudflats, and as we told you upstairs, it got a little wet at high tide. So after the fire, the city had a great opportunity to raise the streets up from the tide line and make downtown safe, dry, and sewage free. But raising the streets was a huge undertaking—and undertaking is the right word here because although no one died during the fire, a few people did die in the streets and especially the sidewalks afterward.”
He pointed up to the modern sidewalk above us. “This was all open for several years while the streets went up. So the people who wanted to get into the buildings to shop or do business would come down a ladder or stair at the end of the block and walk along the sidewalks down here. Unfortunately, they occasionally missed the ladders and fell to their deaths. This was about the same time miners on the way to the Klondike were pouring into Seattle. Heavy merchandise from the shops often ended up stacked on the streets and sometimes a box or barrel would fall into the open sidewalks and kill a pedestrian here below. So you can see it was a real adventure going shopping downtown in those days.”
He smiled and the tourists smiled back until he continued, “Now, I hope none of you folks are afraid of ghosts, because this corner is reputed to be the most haunted part of the underground we’re going to walk through today. But don’t worry, we’ve never lost a guest. No matter how hard we try.”
A few of our fellow tourists glanced at each other with shaky bravado and I, of course, didn’t say they’d been shoulders-deep in phantoms since they’d parked their cars.
As he went on about the bank that had originally occupied the building, I found myself peering around with trepidation, staring more sharply at shapes and shadows than I might have.
“Now, I’ve never seen it,” the guide continued, “but several of the other tour guides and the crew of a TV show that filmed down here say they’ve seen the ghost of a young man at this corner. He is thought to have been a bank teller who worked in this bank right here. The story goes that he was killed by a miner in a dispute over a… lady of negotiable affection.”
The crowd tittered, but I recoiled as something that was definitely not a young man dead or alive loomed up in the icy cold, malforming the lines of energy that strung through the space like a net.
“Bitch,” someone whispered in the silvered gloom of the Grey. I looked for the speaker but could only spot a moving columnar disturbance in the thin mist and bright lines. Whoever or whatever it was didn’t have enough power to come any further out of the paranormal, and I was just as glad of that, considering the vicious tone of its voice.
Unaware of the uncanny member of our group, the tour guide was explaining the glass prisms embedded in the sidewalks above that cast light down into the buried level. As he talked about the manganese that turned the prisms purple over time, I felt the unseen thing halt in front of me, twined in lines of energy like an insect in a carnivorous vine.
“Don’t interfere with me,” it murmured.
Startled, I jerked back. “What?” I hadn’t expected something so barely present to be aware of me, much less so angry.
“Meddler, busybody…” the thing whispered. The lines flared as it surged toward me, and fell back, restrained by whatever spell those strands of elemental energy wove. I racked my brain. I knew what this thing was if I could just recall…