“‘Hello’ is not in the poem,” said the voice. “I studied it in school. The next line is,‘And swear/No where/Lives a woman true and ...’”
“Where are you?” Jack asked.
“What do you mean where am I? I’m standing right across from you.”
Jack whirled around. Standing in front of a column across the mezzanine was a skinny girl about his own age. Her dirty-blond hair was pulled back in a messy ponytail. She wore kneesocks, a short, pleated skirt, a white blouse, and a navy blue blazer with a yellow insignia. She had a small mouth, which gave her a hard look, and her eyes were a pale, almost translucent blue.
Jack leaned against the column as she walked over to him. “Were you there the whole time you were talking to me?” he asked.
The girl gave him a funny look. “I’m Euri,” she said.
“Jack,” he murmured.
“Enchantée!”
Jack raised his eyebrows.
“That’s ‘nice to meet you’ in French,” she explained. “How old are you?”
“Fourteen.”
“Me too!” Euri exclaimed. She continued to stare at him. He smiled nervously. “You’re not from around here, are you?” she finally asked.
Jack felt challenged. “Actually, I was born here. But after my mother died—”
“Your mother died here?” Euri interrupted.
Jack instantly regretted mentioning it. “Yeah . . .” he added quickly, “and so after she died, my dad and I moved to New Haven.”
Euri had a look of horror on her face. “New Haven?” she repeated. “That’s awful!”
Jack didn’t know what to say. He’d never met anyone who thought that living in New Haven was worse than having a dead mother. “It’s actually much nicer than people think,” he stammered.
Euri waved away the rest of his defense as if she’d heard it before. “Are you here by yourself?”
Jack nodded. “I have to go back home soon,” he said. “My dad is wait—”
“You want to do some sightseeing?” Euri interrupted again. “I can give you a tour!”
“That’s okay.” He looked down at his watch to suggest that he had to leave.
“Oh, come on. I know this station inside out,” she bragged. “I can show you some really cool places you won’t see on the official tour. Only real urban explorers know about them. Like FDR’s secret door.”
Jack forgot himself and looked her in the eye. “What’s that?”
Euri smiled in a self-congratulatory way. “Years and years ago, when President Roosevelt came into town, his train used to stop on a special track in Grand Central. His limo would drive off the train and through this secret door into an elevator. Then he’d go up to the garage of the Waldorf-Astoria hotel and pop out onto Forty-ninth Street without anyone knowing. Pretty neat, huh? Not many people know about it.”
Jack looked uncertainly around the whispering gallery. “Is it far from here?”
“Not so far,” said Euri. “It’s on track sixty-one.”
Jack had no idea where track 61 was. He gnawed on his lip. It would be nice to actually see something in New York, especially something that most people didn’t know about. He liked the idea of being an urban explorer. His father would understand a short side trip to see something historical, like FDR’s secret door. And Euri didn’t seem like the type of person he had to watch out for in New York. She was just a girl his own age, the first one he’d met who didn’t seem to feel sorry for him.
Jack looked at his schedule. There was another train to New Haven in forty minutes. He would call his father after he was done exploring to tell him he’d be on that train. “Okay,” he told Euri. “I have a half hour, I guess.”
Jack followed Euri up the ramp into the main hall of the terminal. She was a fast walker, and he had to nearly run to keep up with her. He studied her back and tried to figure out what to say. The uniform caught his eye. It suddenly struck him as strange that she was wearing it during the Christmas holiday. But just as he was about to ask, she glanced back at him. “Not much farther,” she said.
Jack studied the main hall of the terminal, but the signs only confused him: all the tracks were numbered up to the low forties, and on the lower level they started in the hundreds. There didn’t seem to be any tracks in the sixties. “Are you sure there’s a track sixty-one?” he asked.
“Of course there is,” she said without even turning around. “But it wouldn’t be a secret if it were obvious.”
Jack followed Euri onto the platform of track 42. A train was idling alongside it as passengers boarded. He wondered if they were going to get on the train, too, but Euri continued down the edge of the track, past the conductor standing near the door of the last car. Up ahead, in the middle of the platform, Jack saw a brightly lit tile stairway leading down to the lower level. A sign in red letters above it read
EXIT
.
“Is that where we’re going?” he asked.
For the first time since they left the whispering gallery, Euri stopped walking. “Nope. We’re going down there.”
Jack followed her finger, which was pointing over the end of the platform and onto the tracks.
He backed away. “Is that safe?”
“We’re just going down there for a second so we can crawl onto that walkway. Do you see it?” Euri pointed into the darkness. Jack squinted and, sure enough, saw a narrow walkway perched a few feet above the tracks. “Come on,” said Euri. “This’ll be fun.”
She climbed down a small metal ladder that led down to the track, and Jack slowly followed her. Toxic-looking yellow puddles dotted the track. Jack picked his way around them, following Euri till they reached another ladder up to the walkway. Euri turned to him and smiled. “See, that wasn’t so bad. It’s not far now.”
Jack tried to smile back. The air inside the tunnel smelled sharp and electric. As he scurried along the walkway after Euri, he could see rats darting across the tracks below. There were no other people, though he occasionally heard voices and the clanking sounds of machines echoing under the low ceiling of the tunnel.
STAY ALERT
advised a rusted metal sign bolted to the tunnel wall. Jack paused, wishing he knew exactly where track 61 was and how far Euri was taking him. He stopped to pull the Viele map out of his backpack and squinted at it in the dim light. Tracing the veiny lines with his finger, he realized that they formed a circle around the terminal. But the rest didn’t make a bit of sense to him. Euri’s pale ponytail bobbed up ahead in the darkness. He stuffed the map back into his backpack and hurried after her.
Suddenly the track below him glinted silver blue. He spun around. A train was rumbling along it toward them.
The locomotive seemed enormous, big enough to squash him against the wall. As it veered around a curve, two white lights bored into him from above. The train honked its horn, as loud as a steamship, and Jack instinctively flattened himself against the wall and shut his eyes. The earth shook, a roar filled his ears, and a blast of hot, burned-smelling air forced him to hold his breath. He wished he had never followed Euri. Scrunching up his eyes, he waited for the locomotive to crush his body. I’m a fool, he thought, and now I’m going to die.
But a few seconds later, the rumbling stopped and a rush of cool air washed over him. Jack opened his mouth and eyes at the same time, gasping as he watched the red brake lights of the train snake away. His legs were quaking and rubbery. He unstuck himself from the wall and looked for Euri. To his surprise, she wasn’t pressed against the wall but perched on the walkway railing in front of him grin-ning. “What are you doing there?” he shouted. “We almost died!”
He expected her to comfort him, but instead she clapped her hand over her mouth and hunched over, stifling laughter.
“What? We nearly did!”
She straightened back up and wiped a tear from her cheek. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean ...”
But then she dissolved again into silent peals of laughter.
“I should go back now,” Jack muttered.
Euri immediately stopped laughing. “Please, don’t go. I’m really sorry, it’s just . . .” She grinned and shook her head. “We’re almost there.” Jumping off the railing, she continued down the walkway, coughing softly to disguise a few last giggles.
But Jack didn’t follow her. Instead, he looked around the tunnel. A cobweb hung down from the cement ceiling, swinging gently in time with the drafts of air. Jack brushed his hand through his hair. Euri stopped and turned around. “What’s wrong? Are you getting freaked out?”
“No,” said Jack defensively. “This doesn’t scare me.”
“What scares you, then?”
The direct way that Euri had of asking questions made it hard for Jack not to answer. “Dogs,” he said, surprised by his own honesty. “I was bitten by one once when I was seven.”
“I don’t like dogs either,” mused Euri. “But there aren’t any here. Come on.”
At this point, he had no choice but to follow her. A light was out up ahead, and he could hear an eerie whistling sound. Euri disappeared into the darkness. “Come on, it’s right here,” she called. He slowly tiptoed forward, his heart pumping, his legs tingling with adrenaline.
He was on the edge of the darkness. Another step and he was inside of it. A strange warm wind blew through his hair. As his eyes adjusted to the dark, Jack noticed that the walkway ended in a narrow descending staircase, illuminated by a single naked bulb. To his right was a brick wall and a large iron door padlocked shut by a rusty bar.
“Ta-
dum
, track sixty-one!” said Euri, gesturing toward the padlocked door.
But Jack wasn’t looking at the door. “Where does that go?” he asked, pointing to the staircase.
“Oh, that leads to the other levels of the station,” Euri said. “Want to see?”
Jack took a few steps toward the staircase and looked down. “But the guide said there were only two levels.”
“That was the official tour. I’m giving you the unofficial tour. There are nine.”
Jack suddenly remembered the dream he’d had at the hospital, how the nurse had mentioned a ninth floor under New York. “Nine?” He looked at Euri, but she crossed her arms over her chest and stared straight back at him.
“Come on,” she said, “I’ll show you.” With a smirk she added, “It’s a different world down there.”
Jack pinched his arm with his fingernails to make sure he wasn’t dreaming. He stared at the red crescents left behind. He thought about his accident. “Let’s go,” Euri said brightly as she skipped down the stairs. Jack clutched the black cast-iron banister and followed.
“There’s something strange about you,” Jack called out to the swinging pale ponytail ahead of him. He was surprised by his own boldness. He would never have said this to any of the girls at school. Perhaps that was what was so strange about Euri—that he felt comfortable around her.
“Like what?” Euri replied.
Jack hesitated. They had just passed a cinder block vestibule that marked their second flight of stairs. His hair fluttered gently in the warm wind, and he wondered whether it was the hot air of a furnace below. The bulbs on the ceiling above him flickered.
“Why are you wearing your uniform now? Aren’t you on Christmas break?”
The stairway grew suddenly silent so that the only footsteps Jack could hear were his own. He bit his lip. “Euri?”
“I don’t want to talk about the uniform,” she finally said.
Jack felt his face grow warm.
“Don’t feel bad,” Euri said, a few moments later. “I just don’t want to talk about it, okay? I didn’t like the school.”
“Okay,” said Jack, glad she wasn’t angry. Still, her answer didn’t seem to make sense.
“So,” said Euri. “Why did you come to New York, anyway?”
“I had a doctor’s appointment,” said Jack.
“Is there something wrong with you?”
“No,” he said. “I mean, I don’t think there is.”
“So the doctor said you were healthy?”
“Yes, why? Do I look sick or something?”
Euri laughed. “No.”
Something warm and wet suddenly dropped onto Jack’s forehead, and he cried out.
“What is it?” Euri asked.
Looking up, he noticed the cement had dripped into long cones like the stalactites in a cave, and large, shining drops of water hung pendulously from the ends of them. “Nothing,” said Jack, his face warm again. “Just water.”
By the third flight, the water was dripping at regular intervals and his hair felt damp. Except for the pitterpatter of drops and the gentle gusts of warm wind, there was no sound at all besides their footsteps.
Four. Five. Jack’s knees began to ache. On the sixth level, the bulb was out. By the seventh flight, Jack felt like he’d passed into a dream. The constant ache of his legs stopped. Euri had disappeared around the bend of the next flight of stairs. Jack rounded the corner of the eighth flight and nearly crashed into a stone wall.
There were no more stairs. He had reached the ninth level. But where was he? He could barely see in the dim light. Close by, he could hear water lapping and voices talking over each other in a strange, disembodied way. “Can you hear me?” “Hello, Michael!” “Want to hear a secret?” It sounded as if there were dozens of people standing just around the corner.
“Come on, Jack,” Euri called in a voice louder than the rest.
Jack tiptoed forward along the wall until he could see her standing a few feet in front of him in an empty, high-ceilinged room that reminded him of an Egyptian tomb. Thick, stone pillars stretched toward the ceiling, and what looked like a slender canal of murky water flowed through the center of it. Next to the canal, on a piece of cardboard, sat a bony old man with matted hair and a scruffy beard. He wore a black hooded sweatshirt with the words
Circle Line
printed in faded script on the front. One of his gnarled hands rested on a two-by-four that lay beside him.
“Who’s that?” Jack whispered.
“Just the bum who hangs out here,” Euri said. “Don’t worry about him.”
Jack looked at the homeless man, who didn’t seem to register their conversation.
“Come on,” said Euri. “I can show you the coolest thing of all on the other side of the canal.”
But as they reached the edge of the canal, the homeless man suddenly glared at Jack and stuck out a bony hand.
“Old beggar,” Euri said dismissively. She turned to Jack. “He’s seen me before. But he seems to want something from you.”
Jack reached into his pocket and dropped some change into the man’s outstretched hand. The beggar looked at what Jack had given him, frowned, and threw the coins at him. Jack leaped backward.
Even Euri looked alarmed. “Don’t you have something else to give him?”
“Like what?” Jack turned to the old man. “Do you want food? My jacket?”
The man continued to stare silently at him.
Jack dug into his pockets again and pulled out everything he could grasp. Dr. Lyons’s token glittered among the lint and pennies and gum wrappers. He picked it out. It seemed a shame to give it away. But he didn’t have anything else. He dropped it in the old man’s palm.
The old man studied the token. Then he jumped to his feet with surprising agility, and before Jack could back away, hefted the two-by-four over his shoulder. Jack raised his hands to protect his head, but the old man turned away from him and slapped the wooden plank over the canal. Then he pointed to Jack and gestured for him to cross it.