The Secret Runners of New York Page 11

  ‘Good point,’ I said.

  ‘As my mom told me, you just have to pick a book that you hate enough to cut the middle out of,’ Misty said.

  Everyone laughed.

  ‘You know, it’s funny,’ Chastity said sadly when the laughter had died down. ‘I’m going to be eighteen in June, so these’ll be my last runs. After that, the portal won’t let me through. I have to admit, though, I’m sorta done with running. Over it. It’s been fun but I’m happy to pass it on to you guys, the next generation, so to speak.’

  She nodded solemnly to the group and they nodded back.

  Red grimaced. ‘Hey, in three weeks, the whole world might fizzle out, so we may as well enjoy ourselves.’

  ‘Too true.’ Misty turned to face me. ‘I mean, whatever happens on March 17, you have to admit, this was a total rush.’

  THE LAST DAYS OF FEBRUARY

  I found it very hard to concentrate on anything the next week. My mind kept drifting back to the run, fixating on the tiny details.

  The knee-high stone pyramid.

  The rows of carved skulls.

  The cave paintings of priests holding coloured gems and men running from dogs—or were they wolves?

  The mysterious trash heap.

  My pink kangaroo toy, Hoppy, with the note in her pouch: HE IS WAITING FOR YOU.

  And, of course, the cackling bald figure at the top of the well who had called, ‘Hello, pretty girl!’

  He was the worst part of it.

  He invaded my dreams.

  Three times that week, I woke up shouting and breathless, gasping for air and drenched in sweat. His evil laugh echoed in my head.

  St Patrick’s Day was now only a month away and in some parts of the world edginess was beginning to show: there were protests in France (what they were protesting against, I didn’t quite know; I was pretty sure the gamma cloud wasn’t listening) and mass prayer events in Mecca, Jerusalem and Rome.

  In the States, we did what we always did: repressed our darkest fears and kept buying shit. Apart from a spattering of more hate crimes and some news reports criticising the President and key members of Congress for their plan to hide in a secret underground facility during the gamma cloud (‘I’m not doing it by choice,’ the President said, ‘I’m doing it for America.’), it was, at least for the moment, life and business as usual in America.

  In my corner of New York City, that meant everyone was talking about the East Side Cotillion. It would take place on Saturday March 3 whether the world ended a couple of weeks later or not.

  That meant a flurry of last-minute activity for Misty: final dress fittings, personal training sessions, lettuce-only meals, formal afternoon teas, rehearsals, two evening soirees and lots of gossip.

  Misty had asked Bo to be her primary escort. Her other cavalier, she said, was ‘some pleb boy from the military academy who I was forced to invite’. In any case, this had meant that Bo had to attend several of those pre-Cotillion events.

  After the kiss I’d shared with him, I must admit I was a little jealous. And at school, in the presence of our friends—were they really my friends now?—Bo kept a careful distance from me.

  No matter how hard I tried to justify it all in my mind (I mean, Misty had asked him to the Cotillion), and to not be ‘that girl’—stupid, needy, and boy-dependent—I still felt a little hurt and confused.

  In the end, I figured it was due to Misty. Bo knew of her crush on him—knew how possessive she could be—and didn’t want to complicate things before the Cotillion. I gave him the benefit of the doubt, rationalising that he was keeping his distance so as not to make things difficult for me with Misty.

  I hoped to see him at the Met again after school, if only to discuss the run on the weekend, but he was called away on Cotillion and Head Boy duties every afternoon that week.

  I did, however, encounter one new individual.

  Mrs Starley Collins, Misty and Chastity’s—and Oz’s—mother.

  I literally bumped into her out the front of the San Remo one morning on my way to school—or more precisely, she bumped into me.

  I was coming out the front doors of our building, heading to school on my own that day, when Mrs Collins, walking backwards and scanning the street for her limo, accidentally tripped into me.

  She was, quite simply, the prototype for Chastity and Misty: blonde, blue-eyed, and for a woman in her early fifties, impressively fit and slim, almost as buff as my mother. In the early hours of each morning, the StairMasters of the San Remo must have been working overtime.

  ‘I’m so sorry—’ she blurted. ‘Oh,’ she cut herself off, recognising me. ‘You’re the new girl. Skye, right?’

  ‘Yes, Mrs Collins,’ I said. Of course, I’d seen her before but we had never spoken.

  ‘Call me Starley, darling. I feel like an old woman when someone calls me Mrs Collins.’ She leaned closer, smiling knowingly. ‘Misty told me you’ve joined her running club.’

  I returned the smile. ‘Yes, ma’am. On the weekend.’

  ‘They do run in a very interesting place, don’t they?’

  ‘They do,’ I said, enjoying the cryptic nature of the conversation. Secret clubs will do that to you.

  ‘Beats doing laps around the Reservoir with the peasants. I remember when I ran, way back when,’ she said wistfully and a little too dramatically.

  At that moment, her limo pulled up, the driver leaping to open the door. ‘Well, I’m simply charmed to make your acquaintance, Skye. I have to go and join Misty at a fitting. The Cotillion is on Saturday and I want to make sure my Misty makes an impact.’

  She slid into the limo and as the driver closed the door, I heard her say to him, ‘You’re fucking late, asshole. You were supposed to be here at eight.’

  I checked my watch. It was 8:03 a.m.

  On the Friday of that week—February 23—I left school on my own.

  I ventured to the Met, pretty certain that Bo wouldn’t be there, and sure enough he wasn’t.

  I sighed but sat down anyway near the Temple of Dendur and opened one of my books. I’d been reading for an hour or so when abruptly someone put their hands over my eyes from behind.

  ‘Guess who?’

  It was Bo.

  I smiled broadly, every nerve inside me suddenly alive. ‘I thought you’d have other things to do besides studying.’

  ‘Not anymore. My evening function got cancelled. And I didn’t come here to study.’

  He opened his right hand to reveal Misty’s necklace with the amber gem in it.

  ‘I borrowed this from Misty. Wanna go for a run right now? Just the two of us?’

  PRIVATE RUN

  The sun was setting as Bo led me down the side of the Met and into the hidden conservancy garden near the Transverse.

  Even in daylight, it was hard to get to. A fence and a dense cluster of bushes shrouded the garden from public view: you could walk past it every day and never know it was there. The sunken hatch at the farthest end of the private garden might as well have been a myth.

  By any standard, it was a sublime time to be in Central Park: the leaves of the trees lit by the dying light of the sun. They shot movies here at this time of day. Romantic stuff.

  I couldn’t believe we were doing this.

  Together. Just the two of us.

  My heart thumped loudly inside my head. I was giddy at both the prospect of doing another run and doing it alone with Bo.

  All those confused feelings I’d had about him keeping his distance from me in order to save me from Misty were washed away. He could have done this run with any of the runners—especially Misty—and he had chosen to do it with me.

  Arriving in the underground entrance chamber—evidently he had also got the keys to all the locks from Misty—Bo placed the gemstone on the low pyramid and the rippling curtain of
light appeared.

  ‘You ready?’ he asked.

  Even though I was still in my school uniform, he wore jeans, sneakers and a shell jacket. I noticed then that he also had a pack on his back.

  ‘You bet,’ I replied, looking from the backpack to his eyes.

  Then we stepped through the light-barrier together.

  SECOND RUN

  Even though it was only my second time inside the tunnel, it felt like my third. I think I’d mentally appropriated Red’s initial run as my own.

  And this run was actually more of a walk. It was not the late-night scramble that my first one had been with the larger group.

  After he removed the gem from the little pyramid and extinguished the curtain of light behind us, Bo lingered near the entrance and took photos of the ancient carvings and drawings.

  ‘I’ll share all these photos with you later,’ he said. ‘I want to look them up afterward. See if I can figure out what this place actually is.’

  There it was again, that curiosity. It was one thing to run through here for cheap thrills but, like me, Bo wanted to know what it was we were actually running through.

  He peered at the cave paintings of the priests holding their coloured gems and the young men running from the dogs.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about these paintings. Did some more research,’ he said. ‘I don’t know about the guys holding the jewels, but these images of the running men resemble paintings found in some Mayan ruins in Guatemala. Those paintings are thought to represent initiation ceremonies for young warriors: the would-be warriors had to outrun a pack of wolves through a narrow canyon or tunnel. I wonder if running through this tunnel—in another time, chased by wolves, with only one way in and one way out—was an initiation ritual of some kind. A test of nerves for teen boys. After all, only young people can enter it.’

  ‘Not a bad theory.’

  ‘I haven’t even got started,’ Bo said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I want to see what’s up there.’

  ‘You want to go outside?’ I said, alarmed.

  ‘Don’t you? Don’t you want to know what’s out there?’

  I thought of the cackling bald man up there, but I had to admit, I did want to know.

  I nodded silently.

  We were still near the entrance portal. I looked back into the entry cave and saw the dust-covered ladder leading back up out of it.

  ‘Do we go up that way?’ I asked.

  Bo shook his head. ‘We can’t. We checked it on one of our first runs. In this time or dimension, something heavy has been placed on top of the hatch up there. Dane, Griff and I couldn’t get it open no matter how hard we pushed. It’s the same with the hatch at the other end of the tunnel. We’ll have to go out through the well hole.’

  A short while later, we came to the trash heap under the well hole and I saw the full extent of Bo’s preparation.

  He extracted from his backpack a long nylon rope with knots along its length and a triple-pronged steel hook at one end: a grappling hook.

  Bo straddled the top of the trash heap, his feet sliding awkwardly against the accumulated litter as he tried to get a stable footing, and then he began throwing the hook up into the well shaft.

  It took five attempts—it wasn’t an easy throw, even for an athlete like Bo, and every time the hook clattered loudly against the upper rim of the well and fell back, I thought of the bald man hearing it.

  Then, with a soft whack, the hook caught hold of the rim and didn’t fall back.

  Bo tested it. It held his weight.

  He looked at me with an excited smile. ‘Let’s go and see what’s up there.’

  He must have seen my hesitation, because right then he paused and stepped over to me. He held me close in his arms, leaned down and kissed me tenderly on the lips.

  If our first kiss had been quick, spontaneous and uncertain, our second one was confident, assured and unhurried. Damn, it was good. I could definitely get used to kissing Bo Bradford.

  After a pleasantly long time, we separated.

  ‘It’ll be fine,’ he said. ‘Trust me.’

  Then he turned, grabbed the rope and began climbing it, hand over hand, gripping the knots along its length. Within moments, he had clambered up and out of the tunnel. I watched him go all the way up the well until I saw his feet disappear over the outside rim.

  And suddenly I was wholly alone in the tunnel and I didn’t like it.

  It was almost as if I could hear ancient voices screaming.

  I looked at the trash heap and noticed that Hoppy the Happy Kangaroo was still there.

  I didn’t want to stay there by myself, so I grabbed the first big knot on Bo’s rope and hauled myself quickly up it.

  If the tunnel was claustrophobic, the well was doubly so.

  I only just fit inside it. The slick brick walls closed in tightly around me, with barely a few inches to spare on either side.

  At length, I reached the top, where Bo was waiting with an outstretched arm and he pulled me up the last two feet.

  I stepped out of the well and stood on solid ground beside him.

  And then I looked up.

  ‘Oh, God . . .’ I breathed.

  PART III

  NEW YORK REBORN

  Nothing is flat or solid. If you look closely enough at anything you’ll find holes and wrinkles in it. It’s a basic physical principle, and it even applies to time. Even something as smooth as a pool ball has tiny crevices, wrinkles and voids . . . There are tiny crevices, wrinkles and voids in time.

  Stephen Hawking

  Skye and Bo’s Run

  THE ‘NEW’ NEW YORK

  We were standing in the same thicket of thornbushes that I had found a couple of weeks earlier . . .

  . . . only now the bushes had been cut away, cleared, so that the well stood on a bare patch of open dirt about the size of three car spaces. That bare section of dirt was ringed by thick shrubbery beyond which I could see the outline of the Swedish Cottage.

  An abandoned firepit—its embers long cold, its ashes grey—sat on the earth beside the well, as if someone had camped here. The bald guy, I guessed.

  Central Park loomed around us.

  As far as I could tell, it was exactly the same time of day in this alternate New York as it was in my real New York: a cool February evening, about 5:30 p.m., the edge of sunset.

  If we were indeed stepping through a tear in the fabric of time, the days, it seemed, were overlaid on each other.

  The same seemed to apply to the season. The weather felt the same and the trees had the same amount of leaves and snow on them as they did back home.

  I raised my gaze westward.

  Through the skeletal upper branches of the trees in that direction, I glimpsed the taller buildings on Central Park West, including my own home, the San Remo.

  I froze.

  Giant blood-red letters blazed out from the front flanks of both towers of the San Remo:

  The letters were enormous, each one perhaps two storeys high, so that the two messages took up the entire front faces of the two towers.

  (I couldn’t be sure from this distance, but there appeared to be a figure hanging by the neck from one of the windows, too.)

  Other buildings had been similarly vandalised.

  Bo took photos of them with his phone.

  I turned slowly, taking it all in.

  I was worried about the bald man, but the only sign of his presence were some large bootprints in the dirt by the firepit. He wasn’t here, at least not right now.

  Eerie silence surrounded us. Nothing moved in the trees.

  It took me a moment to realise the really freaky part of it all.

  There was no sound.

  Nothing. None of the usual noises of the world’s m
ost famous metropolis. No honking car horns or wailing sirens: the signature soundscape of New York City.

  This New York was deathly silent.

  Looking more closely at the buildings overlooking the park, I saw that nearly every window of every building was shattered.

  A multitude of vines, unchecked for who-knew-how-many years, snaked out of those windows, while green moss covered whole sides of skyscrapers.

  It was like nature had overtaken New York.

  ‘Let’s go take a look,’ Bo said, stepping away from the well.

  I wanted to say, ‘Are you kidding?’ but I was curious, too, so I just said cautiously, ‘Not too far.’

  The first familiar thing we came to was the Swedish Cottage.

  In this New York, however, the cottage was a ruin. Its roof had caved in. Its walls were bowed and twisted. Its windows were all broken.

  It was the same with the Shakespeare Garden. In our world, the Shakespeare Garden was designed to look like an idyllic English country estate: rustic benches, flagstone paths, weeping willows and gorgeous flowerbeds, all of it meticulously maintained. Newlyweds would often get their photos taken there.

  Not so here.

  The Shakespeare Garden of this New York was overgrown with weeds, derelict in the extreme.

  Its flowerbeds had been swamped by invading vines. Its broad walking paths had been so overwhelmed by sprouts and thistles rising up through the cracks that they were difficult to even see.

  I frowned, confused and wary.

  We ventured toward the western border of the park, crossing a bridge that spanned the 79th Street Transverse.

  As we looked down into it, we saw that the Transverse was also overgrown with unchecked plant life. Noxious weeds and a million dandelion stems had risen up through the asphalt, cracking it, warping it and covering it.