“But we don’t know that,” said Tom-Tom Crow, mostly to make the matter clear to himself. “Eric knows what they do with the Cub List, but if it’s the same frigging way with the Death List? We don’t know that, do we?”
“It’s this evening,” Eric repeated to himself.
“Finally we’re getting out of here,” said Snake.
TWILIGHT, 3
When the sun sank behind the horizon and the last breath of daylight colored the sky dark pink and dull red, when the Evening Storm was at hand and could be sensed in the bushes and the crowns of the trees, sometimes he felt ill at ease, reminded of forces that were beyond his control. Then he fled deep down under the ground, to the catacombs that had been constructed by long-forgotten generations, to which the light of day would never reach. There he might wander around and marvel at these endless passageways and crypts where secret societies had held their meetings, where business deals were struck, and where secrets were buried for all time. Deeper and deeper down under the earth he went along a route that wound through the very bedrock, lit up only by the torch he brought with him. The air became damper and damper, full of earth and stone dust; the chill caused him to shake and feel at home. When he’d walked for over a half hour he reduced his pace. It was getting hard to breathe, and he rationed his oxygen. The system of tunnels was several miles long; neither he nor anyone else knew its full extent; it had been built, extended, and added onto for hundreds of years; there wasn’t just one but many architects, and a map would never be drawn. Everyone in the city knew about the tunnels, but there weren’t many who knew how to find an entrance. He himself knew of two, but it was maintained that there were ten of them. He’d investigated a few kilometers in each direction from his starting points, but he didn’t want to go farther than that. It wasn’t necessary, either.
A few meters after the tunnel had become so narrow that he was forced to crouch, it divided in three directions. He took the middle route, a broad but low passage which after ten or so meters came to an end in a small crypt. He extended the torch in front of him and lit up the wall. From out of the ground a cat’s head was sticking up.
“Boo,” he said.
The cat didn’t react. He extended the torch closer to the cat’s eyes, and the cat’s left eyelid seemed to jerk weakly.
Fascinating, he thought.
He’d buried the cat thirteen days earlier, and there was still life in it. He could of course have buried the cat’s head as well, but he was interested to see what would happen. Presumably the loose-tongued cat that had tattled to Dove would never die, but instead live down here in an eternity of eternities. He was not alone in wondering what really happened after the Chauffeurs fetched you.
Soon enough he would see, he thought drily.
He turned around and went back the same way he’d come. He still walked slowly. The chill caused him to move slowly, but it contributed to his thinking swiftly. It didn’t worry him that Eric Bear had succeeded in tracking the Chauffeurs to the hotel down in Yok. Without bothering in the least about the matter, he’d known for a long time that the Chauffeurs camped out at the Esplanade. On the other hand, it made him wary that Nicholas Dove had paid a visit to Sam Gazelle’s apartment the other day. The harder Dove pressed, the greater the risk that the bear would be forced to become truly creative. And Dove was an opponent who couldn’t be defeated without the type of repeated, much-discussed confrontations that he especially disliked.
He stopped. Had he heard a neighing behind him? Was it the cat who had managed to pull itself together for a small sound? He stood dead quiet, listening. Then it was heard again, the growling from his own belly. He smiled. He was hungry.
When he came back up out of the catacombs, the sun had gone down and darkness had overtaken the sky. This was a relief. He felt starved, and decided to visit one of the cafés open in the evening which had spread across the city like weeds the last few years. He