The transit worker hung back a little, trying to stay out of the melee as the group fumbled for tokens and started through the gates. The moviegoers chattered as they went.
With a roar and braking screech of metal on metal, the AA local burst out of the tunnel.
On the platform, all manner of people confronted each other. Swearing in Italian, Lummy let go of his victim and looked around for a bolt-hole.
The first two couples had entered and were staring at the scene in front of them. One of the men moved toward Lucky Lummy as the other man grabbed his date and tried to retreat.
The doors of the local hissed open. At this time of night, there were few passengers on the train and no one got of. "There's never a transit cop when you need one," said the would-be rescuer. Momentarily, Lummy considered leaping for the punk and punching out his lights. Instead he feinted at the man, then half-limped, half-ran into the last car. The doors snapped closed and the train began to move. It might have been the light, but the bright grafitti on the sides seemed to change.
From inside the car, Lucky Lummy laughed and gestured obscenely at Sarah, who was feeling for bruises and trying to rearrange her soiled clothing. Lummy aimed a second gesture at the woman's inadvertent rescuers as the entire group converged on Sarah.
Abruptly Lummy's face contorted with fear and then outright terror as he began beating on the doors. The man who had tried to stop Lummy caught one last glimpse of him clawing at the rear door of the car as the train sped into darkness.
"What a creep!" said the date of the would-be rescuer. "Was he one of those jokers?"
"Naw," said his friend. "Just a garden-variety asshole." Everyone froze as they heard the screams from the uptown tunnel. Over the diminishing roar of the local, they could hear Lummy's hopeless, agonized cries. The train vanished. But the screams lasted until at least 83rd Street. The transit worker moved toward the downtown tunnel as the hero of the hour was congratulated by the mostly unharmed Sarah, as well as by the rest of the onlookers. Another transit employee came down the steps at the other end of the platform.
"Hey!" he yelled. "Sewer Jack! Jack Robicheaux. Don't you ever sleep?"
The exhausted man ignored him and let himself through a metal access door. As he walked down the tunnel, he began shedding his clothes. A watcher might have thought she had seen a man squatting down and crawling along the damp floor of the tunnel, a man who had grown a long snout filled with sharp, misshapen teeth and a muscular tail capable of smashing the watcher into jam. But no one saw the flash of greenish-gray scales as the erstwhile transit worker joined the darkness and was gone.
Back on the 81st Street platform, the spectators were still so transfixed by the echoes of Lummy's dying screams that few noted the rumbling, bass roar from the other direction.
Her last class over, Rosemary walked wearily toward the 116th Street subway entrance. One more task completed for today. Now she was on her way to her father's apartment to see her fiance. She had never had much enthusiasm for that, but these days she had little enthusiasm for anything at all. Rosemary moved through the days wishing that something in her life would be resolved.
She shifted her armload of books to her right arm as, onehanded, she sifted through her purse for a token. Walking through the gate, she paused, standing to one side to stay out of the path of the other students. Judging from the placards carried by a number of the people, the latest antiwar rally must have just ended. Rosemary noted some apparently normal kids carrying signs lettered with the joker Brigade's informal slogan: LAST TO GO-FIRST TO DIE.
C.C. had always been into that. She had even sung her songs at a few of the less-rowdy gatherings. One day she had even brought home a fellow activist, a guy named Fortunato.
While it was nice that the man was involved with the joker Rights movement, Rosemary didn't like pimps, geishas or no geishas, in her apartment. It had caused one of the few fights she had ever had with C.C. In the end C.C. had agreed to check with Rosemary more closely about future dinner guests.
C.C. Ryder had tried and tried to convince Rosemary to become active, but Rosemary believed that helping a few people directly could do as much good as standing around shouting condemnations of the "Establishment." Probably a lot more good. Rosemary knew she came from a conservative family. Her roommate rarely let her forget it.
Rosemary took a deep breath and launched herself into the flood of people. All the late classes had evidently gotten out at the same time.
As Rosemary walked onto the platform, she moved around the rear of the crowd so she could end up at the far side of the waiting area. She didn't feel like being that close to people right now. Moments later she felt the flood of dank tunnel air and shivered inside her damp sweater. Deafening, depressing, the local swept by her. All the cars had been defaced, but the last car was even more peculiarly decorated. Rosemary was reminded of the tattooed woman in the Ringling Brothers show she had seen in the old Garden. She had often wondered at the psychology of the kids who wrote on the sides of the trains. Sometimes she didn't like what their words revealed. New York was not always a nice place to live.
I won't think about it. She thought about it. The image of C.C. lying comatose in the I.C. ward of St. Jude's glittered in her mind. She saw the shiny life-support machines. Because C.C. had had no relatives to notify, Rosemary had even been there when the nurses changed the dressings. She remembered the bruises, the black and poisonously blue patches that covered most of C.C.'s body. The doctors were unsure exactly how many times the young woman had been raped. Rosemary had wanted to empathize. She couldn't. She wasn't even sure how to begin. All she could do was to wait and hope. And then C.C. had vanished from the hospital.
The last car looked to be empty. As Rosemary started toward it, she glanced at the graffito. She stopped dead, her eyes tracking the words written on the dark side of the car:
Parsley, sage, Rosemary? Time.
Time is for others, not for rne.
"C. C.! What?" Disregarding the other people who had spotted the unoccupied car, she pushed her way to the doors. They were closed. Rosemary dropped her books and tried to claw the doors open. She felt a nail break. Failing, she beat on the doors until the train began to pull slowly out of the station.
"Not"
Rosemary's eyes filled with tears at the final sight of her name and another of C.C.'s lyrics:
You can't fight the end, But you can take revenge.
Rosemary said nothing else, only stared after the train. She looked down at her fists. The apparently steel door had been soft and yielding, warm. Had someone given her acid?
Was it a coincidence? Was C.C. living underground? Was C.C. alive at all?
It was a long time before the next train came.
He hunted in the near-darkness.
The hunger was upon him; the hunger that seemed never to be fully satisfied. And so he hunted.
Dimly, ever so faintly, he recalled a time and a place when it had been different. He had been someone-what was that?-something else.