The Revelations by Erik Hoel (e ink ebook reader txt) 📕

his ear for sound, hears nothing, looks behind him, then backs up a good ten feet and sprints forward and hops over one of the turnstiles with the ease of a former track captain.

The platform he emerges onto extends far to his right, only eight feet wide, a thin curving line all the way to the end, and is devoid of all but a single figure, a homeless man wearing a tan trench coat and a red baseball cap, slumped down. Across the crisscrossing black beams and dark tracks on the opposite side, isolated as if on a distant moon, a few forms sit on benches.

It’s even hotter here on the platform. Wiping his forehead, Kierk turns and begins walking down the long curving platform. He realizes why it’s so empty: it must be 105 degrees down here. Nobody in their right mind would be down here if they could avoid it. He wonders—if he had heatstroke now on this deserted platform and collapsed, how long it would take for that lady on the opposite side to notice and call the EMTs. How ironic would it be if he cooked his brain like a pan of sizzling eggs just feet away from where Atif had bit it just hours before—what the fuck would anybody make of that? He almost laughs, but pants instead, thinking about everything Carmen had said, but now the emptiness and the heat adds a dimension of seriousness to her claims. He looks warily behind him to the lonely turnstiles. The air is subterranean here, a thing made of ground-up earth, fresh from the city’s granite bowels, and Kierk could detect the aural stink of decomposition, but thinks he is probably imagining it. He wonders where along the track Atif’s body had been obliterated—kinetic energy deposited on a scale that would do nauseating things to a rag-doll entity like a human body. The remainder of it would be smeared the length of the track. How did they even clean that up? Hoses? Spear up all the bits and pieces with trash pickers?

He reaches the other end of the platform, which totals by his estimation maybe three or four hundred feet in length. But the entire thing is very narrow. If Atif had been standing not with his back up against the wall, and someone had come up behind, there was very little room . . . Kierk shakes his head, looking around. Immediately past the turnstiles on this side of the platform a wall ends the pedestrian section, but the platform ledge actually continues, cut to only a minimal span of less than a foot. The man with the red baseball cap is hunched against this nearby wall, not looking up at Kierk. Around some wooden benches Kierk sees dozens of scattered purple pamphlets. He picks one up, reading the blocky yellow letters on its cover, THE THREAT OF SCIENCE, which continue haphazardly on the inner folds: SCIENTISTS SAY THEY WANT TO REDUCE HUMANKIND TO BIOLOGY. BUT EVOLUTION IS UNSUPPORTED BY THE FACTS! SCIENTISTS WANT TO SAY THAT FAITH IS JUST A CHEMICAL REACTION IN YOUR BRAIN. BUT THE HUMAN SOUL CANNOT BE REDUCED TO THE BRAIN!

Holding the pamphlet, Kierk turns to the man with the red baseball cap, who has stood and begun to shuffle toward the end of the platform.

“Hey! Did you see who left these here?” Kierk shouts over the rumble of the train passing on the far side. The hunched figure speeds up, and, as Kierk watches, vanishes out onto the thin continuance of the platform edge and into the catenary mouth of the tunnel. It is as if the man just pierced some veil of dark and disappeared.

“Hey!”

Jogging forward, Kierk slows as he approaches, growing wary. Looking around, the platform is still almost empty. So Kierk places one foot on the protuberance, has a hand against the tiled station wall for balance, and leans out into the tunnel, trying to see how far the ledge extends into the tunnel. It continues as far as is visible, hundreds of feet out, until being lost from view, and is almost hypnotizing in its curve. He expects to see, in the dark, a figure hugging the wall far down, slowly creeping away. But instead he sees nothing. Had he hallucinated the entire thing? No, the man had been real. Kierk hears a squeaking directly beneath him and looks down. Locating the sound in the mess of sundry takeout and pulped newspaper waste stuck up along the tracks, he sees the rats, three of them, suddenly foregrounded, two paused in movement, the third scurrying amid the garbage, and it’s one of the paused ones that draws Kierk’s attention, one of the little dark forms that Kierk can’t quite make out—it’s on top of something, clutching its little paws and mouth around it, gnawing something glinting like the head of a mushroom, something with the nail still attached, a small stub, a brown big toe, and it comes to Kierk in a revelatory rush that there must be many little unaccounted bits still out there, being gnawed upon, taken off to chthonic nests, serving as rotting birthing beds for hosts of hairless rat litters, mewling cannibalistic nibbles out of a rotting—

The crumpled pamphlet dropping out of his hand in shock, Kierk is backing up, he’s turning as the leonine roar of the subway train approaches, he’s beginning to run, hitting the turnstile so hard he bounces off one of its edges, lets out a yelp at the pain in his hip, rounds into the empty corridor, takes the steps three at a time, nearly losing his balance on the slick top step, then is off like a shot down the street, where he loses himself among the people, the vendors, the bicyclists, and Kierk is slowing now, calming, still breathing heavy but just walking now, until, several blocks later, he pauses and, leaning against a brick wall, comforts himself in the propinquity of the crowd.

It couldn’t have