Downsiders, Page 4

  “So, what ya’ reading?” He closed the book to look at the cover, losing her place. “The Time Machine?”

  “I happen to like H. G. Wells,” she said, trying to sound far less defensive than she did.

  “Yeah,” scoffed Todd. “So do most people who don’t have a life.”

  He stood and sauntered toward the door, book still in hand. Lindsay swung out of bed to go after him. “Give me the book, Todd.”

  He didn’t turn back to her until he reached the threshold. When he did, he put out his hand to keep her at arm’s length as she grabbed for the book that he still held teasingly out of reach.

  “I’ve got some advice for you, Lindsay. It’s ten o’clock on a Friday night. Most people are getting ready to party, and you’re sitting here in bed. Do yourself a favor. You’re in New York now. Get a life.”

  And with that he hurled the book toward the jagged hole in the unfinished hallway. The book hit a loose brick, knocking it free, and both brick and book disappeared down the dark crevice between the twin brownstone buildings.

  “Cool,” said Todd. “Two points!” And he sauntered away.

  “Todd!” screamed Lindsay, grinding her teeth in fury, but it was no use. She heard the front door open and close, and he was gone.

  So angry was she that she didn’t hear the distant yowl a few seconds after the book and the brick had fallen....

  ...But much later that night, she did dream she saw something.

  She dreamed that she got up in the middle of the night to get a glass of water. And on her way back to her room, she saw a face watching her from the gap that separated the two buildings. Curly-haired, and with large-pupiled eyes, the shadow-boy peered at her from the dark gap, like a ghost staring out through the looking glass. Then he disappeared with a tiny clatter to that dark space between the bricks. It wasn’t until the morning, when Lindsay found the glass of water on her nightstand, that she realized she hadn’t been dreaming at all.

  The Champ

  On a sorry patch of land on 115th Street, where the roar of the congested FDR Drive actually stunted the growth of trees, sat a small, untended park. It was the kind of park where kids shot baskets through broken chain-netted hoops—kids who had to be skilled at avoiding the clumps of weeds that grew through every wrinkle in the aging asphalt. Twenty yards from the dilapidated court rested a brick building that contained a municipal pool. The pool had been long condemned, but was so forgotten by the Department of Parks and Recreation that no one had ever gotten around to demolishing it.

  The front door was sealed by a rusted knot of a chain and a massive padlock that wasn’t opening for all the keys in the world. As for the windows, they were barred and boarded over, allowing no light to get in. Had there not been a back door, the place might have remained deserted until it grew old enough to be deemed a landmark. But there was a back door, and that door had no padlock—which made the pool building ripe for occupation. In fact, in a city where one had to be a student of the obituaries to find an apartment, what made it odd was that only one person had set up house in there, and not an entire colony.

  The seventy-eight-year-old man who lived in the shell of the abandoned pool was born Reginald Champlain, but the few who knew him just called him “The Champ.” He was wizened by many years of hard living, and had learned the art of living in style. His life story, colorful and intriguing though it may be, is important here only inasmuch as it led him to this particular place at this particular time.

  This wayward park was built on the remnants of the 1894 City Fair, and the pool itself was built directly over the dry riverbed of the fair’s Tunnel of Love. While love was not eternal, apparently its tunnel was, because it had become a part of the Downside—and the deep end of the waterless pool, a good twenty feet deep, provided a fine interface between the world above and the world below.

  Trying to ignore the throbbing knot on his head, Talon made his way past several ancient decaying swan boats until reaching a spot where the dirt ceiling gave way to a broken drainpipe and a square drain above it, eighteen inches wide. Technically speaking, the pool was Topside territory, but with no windows and no real Topside visitors, it could be argued that the lonely building was part of the Downside’s High Perimeter and not part of the Topside at all. At any rate, it was convenient for Talon to consider it such.

  “I thought I heard you scraping around down there,” said The Champ as he saw Talon pulling himself up through the drain. “What are you doin’ out and about so early, hmm?”

  Early for Talon was just after dark. Usually when he popped by for a visit with The Champ, it was in the wee hours of the morning, just before dawn, after a night of Catching.

  “Thought I’d surprise you.”

  “Now why would a kid crawling out of a drain surprise me?”

  Talon grinned, but even that grin was hard, for it made the knot on his head ache—a knot he had earned the night before by standing in precisely the wrong place at the wrong time when a Topsider had decided to hurl a brick his way. It had rendered him unconscious for the better part of an hour, and yet he still wasn’t sure whether that painful encounter had been bad fortune or good.

  The Champ held out his rough hand and helped Talon out of the drain. “Thought you wouldn’t come round here anymore after I whomped your behind in our last game.” He laughed, and Talon had to smile. Though he was here on urgent business tonight, he still couldn’t help but catch a bit of The Champ’s contagious laughter.

  The Champ was the first wayward Topsider that Talon and his friends had tried to bring into the Downside when their catching rotation first began—and yes, he was more than surprised when the three of them came out of the drain. He had tried to swat them away with a broom—half-convinced they were some sort of hallucination—until finally they made him understand why they had come and what they were offering.

  But it turned out they had chosen their first “faller” poorly, for The Champ was content to stay exactly where he was. It was The Champ’s face that first caught Talon’s attention. The whitest of beards across the darkest of faces. His skin was a deep chocolate, and although there were a fair number of dark-skinned people in the Downside, somehow The Champ seemed different. Talon himself had a great-grandfather with chocolate skin—but by the time it distilled down to Talon, the richness had bleached out into the pale hue of his mother’s side of the family. Perhaps it was the resemblance to his great-grandfather that endeared The Champ to Talon, and kept Talon coming back long after he realized the old man would never be drawn to their world.

  Or perhaps it was the way the man had chosen to live his life that impressed Talon: the way he needed neither the Topside nor Downside. The Champ was a man who belonged to neither world—he had created a world all his own here in the shell of the old pool. One needed only to look around to see how well-crafted and self-sufficient The Champ’s life was. The walls of his world were the sides of the pool shell, more spacious than most homes, with a dramatic, vaulted ceiling. The sides of the pool had been painted a gunmetal gray by The Champ himself. “Like the Arizona,” he had once told Talon. “I once served on that ship, you know. Watched from shore as it went down in Pearl Harbor. No sight as awful as the start of a war.” Talon had no idea what he was talking about, but it all sounded important and impressive.

  There was furniture in The Champ’s well-appointed lair: three comfortable sofas, a loveseat, a dining set, and even a chandelier that The Champ had hung from one of the rusty pipes high above. Only the bedroom was spartan—a simple iron bed frame, covered by a taut military blanket, which sat alone in a corner of the deep end.

  The legs of all the furniture, of course, had to be carefully sawed to compensate for the slant of the pool bottom, but The Champ had done the job well. In the end, the decor was so effective, it made one wonder why all homes weren’t built on such an attractive slant.

  And then there were the shelves; dozens of them drilled into the steel side of the pool. Many hel
d knickknacks and cans of food, but there was one special shelving unit where The Champ kept his most valuable collection: his games. As soon as Talon was out of the drain, The Champ went over to that set of special shelves and stood on a chair. “What’ll it be today?” he asked.

  “The usual,” said Talon.

  The Champ reached up and carefully pulled out a flat, old box, then set it down on the dining table. “You gonna be the shoe today, or the thimble?”

  “I’ll be the car,” answered Talon.

  The Champ opened up the board and they began, but Talon’s mind was elsewhere. He moved his piece absently around the board, thinking of weighty decisions he would soon have to make if he were to have any chance of saving his sister’s life. As he thought about her wasting away, he felt the awful weight of his own helplessness. It made him feel weak in the elbows and knees—and weaker still that he had to ask someone on the outside for help.

  “Marvin Gardens,” declared The Champ. “Aren’t you going to buy it?”

  Talon gave him the money, and The Champ gave him the card. He held it in his hand, looking at it so he didn’t have to look at the old man as he spoke. “What do you know about cheating death?”

  The Champ rolled his dice and bought Reading Railroad. “Only that it can’t be done. In the end, everyone takes the dirt nap.”

  “Dirt nap?”

  “You know,” said The Champ, “the deep six; daisy detail; siesta del soil?”

  “Oh. Oh, I get it,” said Talon, taking his turn. “Kind of backwards, though, isn’t it? I mean, going underground after you’re dead.”

  That gave The Champ pause for thought. He held the dice, but didn’t throw them. “Why? What do your people do...if you don’t mind me asking.”

  Talon minded, but he tried not to let it show. “When someone dies, we divert water from a water main and into a dry runoff tunnel,” he explained. “The surge carries them into the world beyond.”

  “So you just flush ’em,” said The Champ, letting out something between a groan and a chuckle. “You flush ’em like a goldfish!”

  Suddenly Talon looked up from the board, remembering something. He stood abruptly. “I’ll be back.”

  Talon slipped down the drain, shoved a wet, newspaper-wrapped object under his arm, and climbed back up.

  “What’s this now?” The Champ asked.

  Talon slapped his package down next to the Monopoly board and pulled back the wet pieces of newspaper to reveal a prize carp, as fresh as they come. “My father’s a fisherman,” Talon explained. “We get these all the time.” It was a good foot-and-a-half long, with perfect gold scales that glistened in the light of the hanging chandelier.

  “You brought me a giant dead goldfish?”

  “It’s a carp,” explained Talon. “I mean, sure, they start off as goldfish. Topsiders send ’em down into the sewers thinking they’re dead—but lots of times they revive. They can live for years down there before we fish them out. Life in the main line makes them real hardy.”

  The Champ nodded, never taking his eyes off of the fish. “Guess you could call it carpal tunnel syndrome,” he said, and laughed aloud at his own joke.

  “Anyway,” said Talon, “once we catch them, we keep them alive in a freshwater pen for a few months, to get all the sludge out of their system so they’re good to eat.”

  Then The Champ got serious for a moment. “I’ll be damned,” he murmured. “You wanna talk to someone about cheating death, talk to this here fish.” He brushed his fingers across the smooth body of the carp. “It’s a shame after all he’s been through that he has to end up like this.”

  Then he turned his eyes to Talon and offered him a grateful nod. “Thank you, Talon. I’ll cook it up straightaway. Been a long time since I had a good piece of fish.”

  Talon looked to the game board again, but the dice seemed to have disappeared. His little silver car now rested on the big question mark labeled CHANCE? and when Talon looked up, he caught The Champ staring at him.

  “Why the gift, son? What is it you want from me?”

  Talon had to wrestle his own eyes to keep them from looking away. “My sister’s very sick,” he finally told him, at last baring his helplessness to the old man. “She’s got a fever, and won’t stop coughing, and I don’t know what to do—but if I don’t do something, she’ll die.”

  “I’m not a doctor. You have to get her to a hospital.”

  Talon shook his head. There were some Downside rules even Talon would not break.

  The Champ stood up and paced to the shallow end, then he turned to face Talon again. “So what do you want me to do? You think just because we got stars up here we can wish on ’em and make everything better? You think we got magic potions up here?”

  Talon stood from the table and cleared his throat. “Yes. I do.”

  Slowly The Champ made his way back to the deep end. His voice softened as he came down from his higher ground. “You folks want to have your cake and eat it, too, don’t you? Hating the Surface until there’s something you need.”

  Talon didn’t answer him. He only looked around at the strange spoils The Champ had scavenged from the Topside. In the end, The Champ was no different, and he knew it. Talon waited to see what he would do.

  “She’s got a fever, you say?”

  Talon nodded.

  “Coughing up that green stuff?”

  Talon nodded again.

  The Champ sighed, then gave in. He found a pen, then flipped a pink five-dollar bill over and began to scribble on the back. “Like I said, I’m no doctor, and I can’t be sure what your sister has, but chances are if it can be fixed, one of these’ll do it.”

  He handed the paper to Talon, who tried to read the names. They sounded suitably mystical. Amoxicillin... cephalexin...Augmentin... “Where can I find them?”

  “Pharmacy, but you’ll never get it without a prescription....”

  Talon glanced at the paper again, not quite understanding.

  The Champ brushed a worried hand through his thinning hair. “Listen,” he said, “sometimes people have the stuff just lying around, you know?” But then he shook his head, angry that he had even suggested it. “The thing is, you’re never supposed to take other people’s medicine. It’s dangerous. You get the wrong stuff, or take too much, or if you’re allergic, it can kill you quick as any disease. That’s why there’re laws against it—you see what I’m saying?”

  “I understand,” said Talon, accepting this mantle of responsibility. Then, rather than lingering, he thanked The Champ and slipped back into the drain.

  “You take care now,” said the old man with genuine concern. Talon nodded a stoic good-bye and, in a few short moments he was gone, running through the old Tunnel of Love with a plan already beginning to take shape in his mind.

  Party Uptown

  Legendary throughout the known world was the great city’s celebration of the new year. On the last eve of every year, hundreds of thousands gathered to be part of the festivities in a place appropriately named Times Square, waiting for a ball of light to slip down its pole and herald in a new beginning to the same old story.

  People would cheer, throw confetti, and then go about breaking the resolutions they had made only moments before.

  The Downside knew of this great celebration, for they, too, marked their days by the same basic calendar and had their own revelry to usher in the year. They would gather in the Brass Junction and the Floodgate Concourse, raising toasts to the days ahead and those gone by. And if you asked, they would be quick to tell you that they were the ones who invented New Year’s Eve.

  Talon was conspicuously absent from the Downside celebration, and as the midnight hour approached, Railborn and Gutta were concerned.

  “New Year’s is always his favorite,” Railborn anxiously reminded Gutta. “And he always spends it with us....”

  “He’s probably with Pidge,” yelled Gutta, over the echoing roar of the crowds within the cavernous Floodgate Conc
ourse. Surely Talon’s parents were both at home tending to their sick daughter, but Talon? Stay home on New Year’s Eve?

  “Yes,” said Railborn. “That must be where he is.” But neither of them believed it for an instant.

  Meanwhile, several layers of city sediment above them, Todd Matthias was hosting a party. To him, the mania of Times Square was as passé as frozen yogurt and grunge-wear. He had been there, done that, and was determined to celebrate the new year with others who were equally pompous. He chose to populate his party with choice friends from Icharus Academy, the private school that he, and now Lindsay, attended.

  Their father was off at his own New Year’s Eve gala—a big affair for VIPs of urban planning. Naturally he had no clue that Todd’s “intimate gathering of friends” was actually a cauldron of hormones and questionable fruit punch—a prelude to the all-night bashes that would someday fill Todd’s entire college career. In effect, this was a fraternity party with training wheels.

  As Lindsay could have predicted, Todd had made no attempt to invite anyone her age. Most of the guests were tenth grade and up because Todd, a freshman, was perpetually brownnosing his way into the older crowd. The only fourteen-year-old girls present beside Lindsay had tagged along with their older boyfriends and were too aloof to have anything to do with her.

  As for Todd, he fancied himself the life of the party and probably figured all activity ceased when he left a room. Lindsay watched as he bragged to a gaggle of debutantes, and she silently wished she had a nice hat pin to pop his swelled head.

  “Yes, we own both these homes,” he bragged, indicating the wide threshold where new masonry now connected the two living rooms. “We decided to expand right here rather than buy that beach house in the Hamptons.”