Excerpt: Nightmares and Cityscapes

The City should have been soaked in rain this time of year, but instead, they’d gotten heat. Heavy, thick, humid, oppressive heat. The kind of heat that made people act completely insane, not that most of them weren’t already by virtue of being in the City in the first place. But the heat did make things worse.

Darvan hated the heat.

The back alley ways were rank with the smell of rotting garbage and waste that was made ten times worse by the way the temperature had sped up the decomposition process. Sweat poured down the back of his neck and drenched the seams of his clean gray business shirt and the rotten sweet smell of it on top of everything else made his stomach turn over unhappily. A dead werecat lay bloated and swollen in the middle of the asphalt and with a grimace he stepped over the body before continuing on his way.

There were too many bodies, no matter where he looked. The heat, maybe, but sometimes when he was alone with those grisly relics, Darvan found himself wondering if there was something more sinister at work. Sometimes the City worked in cycles like that. He hated to think that anyone would willingly be responsible for so much death.

Most of the time, though, it was just people. People hurting other people, and then going crazy with the heat.

Darvan made his way down the stairs at the end of the alley way, counting them as he went to keep from being distracted by anything else. The stairs went down for an eternity, uneven and crumbling off of their stone foundations from years of disuse and abandonment. Moss appeared in small, pathetic patches along the walls on either side, brownish and dying at first but growing until it covered almost half of the stone walls like a fuzzy green carpet as he made his way further down into the depths of the city. The iron railing was stained with rust and snarls of metal curled up from them the wetter it got. Darvan stopped using it and relied on his own feet to judge his way down.

At last he reached the bottom and paused at the huge iron gates before him. On the other side, the waters of the sewers rushed like rapids within the confines of the stone tunnels, carrying more than just waste and refuse of humanity with it. Broken toys, pieces of shattered technology, and even a few small dead animals rushed by as he watched. Darvan stared at the dark waters in thought and then focused on the gates before him. The sewers were a hazard. In a place as huge and populated as the City, they might as well have been whitewater rapids with all of the water needed to wash the unwanted elements of the City away forever. But the chain and padlock for the gates lay in a pile just on the other side of the monstrous iron fence, and the gates themselves were open.

Darvan walked to the end of the fence, the sound of his footsteps too loud in the damp tunnels, and peered through the bars around the corner. Nothing there, and nothing in the other direction that he could see, but the sewers were dotted with more tunnels and passageways where anything could be hiding. Or they might not even need to hide. Darvan doubted that even he could remember where he had and hadn’t been down here well enough to keep from being lost forever in the maze beneath the City.

Then again, the gates had obviously been opened. Whoever had unlocked them hadn’t bothered to try and make it look like it had happened long ago, or like the lock had fallen off for natural reasons. The lock and chain were simply taken off and set tidily aside before the gates had been pushed open. That meant that Darvan had been expected, but it also meant that whoever had opened the gates wanted for Darvan to go through them. That alone made it unlikely that some greater harm was waiting for him on the other side.

And all of this was just cyclical thinking. It didn’t matter what whoever had done this was thinking, or why they had invited Darvan into the sewers. What mattered was what Darvan thought of the situation.

To put it simply, he thought it was a trap.

Now that he was decided, Darvan turned and made his way back towards the stairs. He glanced back over his shoulder at the gates only out of habit of watching his own back, and that was when he saw something that made him stop and turn around. All of his internal alarms were screaming in warning, but it was of no account. Darvan hurried forward, pushed the gates open all of the way, and stopped just at the edge of the sewer trench.

There were stairs carved into the sewer trench, cut so long ago that no one seemed to know why they had been put there in the first place. Normally the waters rushed by right at the edge of the stone trenches, obscuring the steps entirely, but the heat of the summer meant that water was scarcer than normal in the City. River levels had dropped, fountains in the many sector parks and squares had been shut down and drained dry to help with the drought, and even the sewer levels were low enough that the top three steps were visible above the dark waters.

Darvan knelt and picked up the swatch of blue fabric that had caught his attention. He hadn’t noticed it on the way down the stairs because he had been too intent on reaching the bottom and the stairs on this side of the trench would not have been visible from the gates. It had been pure luck that he had looked back again as he made his way uphill once more and had spotted it in the first place.

As his heart pounded, Darvan turned the fabric over in his hand. It was soft, thick as flannel but with a few remaining patches that were as soft as the finest cashmere sweaters. Most of the fabric was too worn to still be snuggly and fuzzy and the dark blue was stained even darker in places with mud and water droplets, but the brown appliqué teddy bear with the matching blue bow tie was still clean, and still there.

Darvan shoved the fabric into his pocket and hurried back through the iron gates, closing them firmly behind him. He didn’t have the key to relock them but he doubted that anyone had even come down this way in years and they probably wouldn’t start now.

Then again, he’d come down. And clearly someone else had been down there recently as well, preparing for his arrival.

Darvan made his way back to the surface as quickly as possible and not just to have enough light to confirm his discovery.

The moment he emerged in the alleyway, he breathed a sigh of relief. The air was putrid with rot but the sewers had been worse. Darvan walked briskly back towards the street, too lost in his thoughts to make note of the fact that the dead werecat was gone, though the stain on the asphalt where it had lay rotting was still there.

As soon as he reached the street, Darvan moved out of the way of the busy sidewalks and stepped into the doorway of an apartment building to safely study his discovery. Glancing around to be certain that he wasn’t being watched, he took the fabric from his pocket and stared at it again in the light. Nothing had changed. It was still the same worn dark blue patch with the happily grinning teddy bear looking at him in a way that was somehow malicious. Darvan reached for his billfold and pulled out the photo he never left home without that nestled folded inside of it. His fingers wanted to shake as he unfolded it as he had times beyond counting, but long practice kept his hands still.

A woman with long blonde hair smiled out of the photo at Darvan, though the smile didn’t quite reach her pale, pale blue eyes. The date in the corner claimed that the picture had been taken approximately seven years ago, in a clean suburb far, far, far away from the City and everyone in it. The woman was slight, though not nearly as skeletal as the one time that Darvan had seen her, and in her thin arms she held a small baby boy with a dusting of white blonde hair in dark blue pajamas with a teddy bear on the pocket.

You promise you’ll find him?

Darvan refolded the photo carefully before tucking both it and the fabric into his wallet.