Inside the culvert, the cat meowed. Magnified, its voice echoed with a new sepulchral tone along the concrete tunnel.
The openings in the steel-bar grid were four-inch squares, wide enough to admit the supple cat but not wide enough for me. The grate extended the width of the opening, from buttress to buttress, but it didn’t reach all the way to the top.
I swung legs-first and backward 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 tigers.
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 gotten 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.
Clutching the railing, I eased past sprouting forms on the slippery concrete,