Underground Read Online Free PDF Page B

and women gathered under the square glass shelter on the south end or stood in knots near the totems on the north side, jigging and hugging themselves against the cold. Fires had been started in trash cans, but those wouldn’t last long before the beat cops or the firemen came by. The figures were all bulky and brown in layers of old clothes that no amount of washing would ever make bright again. Even at a distance I recognized a few of them. I saw them around the Square and near my office all the time. Denizens of streets and alleys, some of them drug users, many of them alcoholics, all of them homeless.
     
     
    I spotted the old man I’d come to know as “Zip”—I’d returned his prized Zippo cigarette lighter to him back in October when a poltergeist snatched it to fling at me—huddling near the glass picnic house with a crowd of rough-looking younger men. They were passing a paper bag around with small, underhand gestures, sharing the bottle within but still sober enough to attempt discretion. There was the talking man who marched back and forth angrily in front of the killer whale totem, muttering in an incomprehensible language. A huge Native American woman sat at the feet of the giant carving of a female figure nearby and watched him, laughing to herself and shuffling through her bags of collected treasures before returning them to a rattletrap wire cart. A group of anonymous, mouselike people gathered in somber contemplation of their trash fire near the remaining parking lot on the east side of the park, looking as if they’d been outcast even by the outcast. Soon they’d all head for the homeless shelters and missions, hoping for food and a bed for the night. Those who couldn’t get in to the crowded facilities would try to find places out of the cold to sleep until morning, or until a cop rousted them. Thinking of what Quinton had said, I wondered how many of them might not wake up, and I shivered. In a fit of pity and guilt, I dug into my pockets and handed over my change to the first panhandler who asked.
     
     
    I noticed other pedestrians avoiding the park altogether, hurrying to warmer, safer places. The presence of poverty and apparent hopelessness frightened them, or maybe they, too, sensed the disturbed and conflicting emotions that roiled in the Grey over the park in combative colors and streamers of cold. Chilled through, I started across Main and through the park, keeping to the middle where the path was the most even and the eddies of Grey tumult thinnest.
     
     
    I was almost to the pair of totem poles at the north end—where the talking man was pacing—when something darted out from behind the giant bear totem on my right. It cackled and giggled and I whirled to face it: a hunched figure in clothes so ragged they looked like streamers of matted fur that flowed out from under his long hair and beard.
     
     
    “Lady, lady,” the man called out, reaching for me as he darted closer. A Grey stink of sulfur and sewage and a hard, metallic tang like blood and steel swirled around me as he came within clutching distance, creating weirdly twisting vortices in the layers of Grey that blanketed the park.
     
     
    I gasped and jumped back with a shock of recognition. This man—this thing—had come running for me before. In an alley nearby, he—it—had asked if I were dead and tried to drag me into the Grey, back when I didn’t know there was such a thing. The last time I’d seen the . . . whatever it was, I thought it was just a drunk in an alley, but now I knew the Grey better and I could see it wasn’t a real man at all—not a ghost but some more corporeal eldritch thing. I reached for a fold in the Grey and yanked it between us, making a shield against the creature.
     
     
    Where other things would and had fallen aside, its hand pushed through my shield as if it were no more than mist. I felt its cold fingertip touch my hand. It stopped without apparent momentum and raised its head,