I swung legs-first and back-ward through the two-foot-high gap between
the top of the grate and the curved ceiling of the drain. I was
grateful that the grid had a headrail, for otherwise I would have been
poked and gouged painfully by the exposed tops of the vertical bars.
Leaving the stars and the moon behind, I stood with my back to the
grate, peering into absolute blackness. I had to hunch only slightly
to keep from bumping my head against the ceiling.
The smell of damp concrete and moldering grass, not entirely
unpleasant, wafted from below.
I eased forward, sliding my feet. The smooth floor of the culvert had
only a slight pitch. After just a few yards, I stopped, afraid I would
blunder into a sudden drop-off and wind up dead or broken-backed at the
bottom.
I withdrew the butane lighter from a pocket of my jeans, but I was
reluctant to strike a flame. The light flickering along the curved
walls of the culvert would be visible from outside.
The cat called again, and its radiant eyes were all that I could see
ahead. Guessing at the distance between us, judging by the angle at
which I looked down upon the animal, I deduced that the floor of the
huge culvert continued at an increased-but not drastic-slope.
I proceeded cautiously toward the lambent eyes. When I drew close to
the creature, it turned away, and I halted at the loss of its twin
beacons.
Seconds later it spoke again. Its green gaze reappeared and fixed
unblinking on me.
Edging forward once more, I marveled at this odd experience.
All that I had witnessed since sundown-the theft of my father’s body,
the battered and eyeless corpse in the crematorium, the pursuit from
the mortuary-was incredible, to say the least, but for sheer
strangeness, nothing equaled the behavior of this small descendant of
figers.
Or maybe I was making a lot more of the moment than it deserved,
attributing to this simple house cat an awareness of my plight that it
didn’t actually possess.
Maybe.
Blindly, I came to another mound of debris smaller than the first.
Unlike the previous heap, this one was damp. The flotsam squished
beneath my shoes, and a sharper stench rose from it.
I clambered forward, cautiously groping at the darkness in front of me,
and I discovered that the debris was packed against another steel-bar
grate. Whatever trash managed to wash over the top of the first grate
was caught here.
After climbing this barrier and crossing safely to the other side, I
risked using the lighter. I cupped my hand around the flame to contain
and direct the glow as much as possible.
The cat’s eyes blazed bright: gold now, flecked with green. We stared
at each other for a long moment, and then my guide-if that’s what it
was-whipped around and sprinted out of sight, down into the drain.
Using the lighter to find my way, keeping the flame low to conserve
butane, I descended through the heart of the coastal hills, passing
smaller tributary culverts that opened into this main line. I arrived
at a spillway of wide concrete steps on which were puddles of stagnant
water and a thin carpet of hardy gray-black fungus that probably
thrived only during the four-month rainy season. The scummy steps were
treacherous, but for the safety of maintenance crews, a steel handrail
was bolted to one wall, hung now with a drab tinsel of dead grass
deposited by the most recent flood.
As I descended, I listened for the sounds of pursuit, voices in the
tunnel behind me, but all I heard were my own stealthy noises.
Either the searchers had decided that I hadn’t escaped by way of the
culvert-or they had hesitated so long before following me into the
drain that I had otten well ahead of them.
At the bottom of the spillway, on the last two broad steps, I almost
plunged into what I thought at first were the pale, rounded caps of
large mushrooms, clusters of vile-looking fungi growing here in the
lightless damp, no doubt poisonous in the extreme.
lutching the railing, I eased past sprouting forms on the slippery