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

like a somnambulist, drawn. Carmen descends into Bleecker Street Station like Persephone into Hades.

In the microclimate the air itself is so heated that when it gusts those strange underground currents it doesn’t cool but heats, the stirring of a pot, and Carmen is sweating profusely as she swipes herself through the turnstiles. The thin platform goes like a yellow brick road on a long arc. Distant figures on the opposite side of the tracks are all fanning themselves. A metallic scream announces a train. When it pulls away the opposite side is empty. Carmen begins walking the long platform, which is only about six feet wide from the wall to the drop to the tracks, and finds herself hugging the wall, shying away from that tubular dark, almost dizzy with vertigo from its close presence. There are just one or two forms on the far end; the only person close is the man coming toward her now. She can hear the building sound of an approaching train. She’s in the middle of the long empty stretch as the man approaches, haggard, beer-bellied, wearing cargo shorts and a stained T-shirt, a big guy. There’s a long moment when he’s staring at her as the two close, and she finds herself shrinking back toward the wall as they pass each other. Right as they are side by side he explosively moves up on her and, grabbing her shirt in one hand and her struggling arm in the other, even as she screams and tries to pull back, the man whips her staggering form around, once, twice, her legs trying to find a way to resist as he grunts this low, bull-like grunt, his face buried in her hair and on the second time around the centrifugal force is enough and he makes an animalistic guttural snort of effort and releases her clawing body into the black gulf off the platform, everything slowing down as she hangs in the impossible air and impossible circumstance, followed by the fall into the dark that takes forever, feeling the thump of her head but not quite losing consciousness, the screams just beginning from somewhere far away . . . All she knows is she’s on something uneven and needs to get up but the coming train is barreling down on her scrabbling form, her mouth of hair and blood, she knows she has to get up, is trying to move but there’s no air in her lungs and her mind is a long high scream of denial as everything gets brighter and brighter and louder and louder . . . a vivid sequence that flashes by in her mind when the bullish man passes her by, muttering to himself. After taking a deep breath and peering over the edge to the tracks to the dirty rails, Carmen exhales slowly, then chuckles at herself as she watches the shambling man wipe at his nose, say something to himself, find a seat back near the entrance she came from. She finishes her walk all the way to the other entrance. There the platform shrinks to a little ledge maybe a foot wide and winds off down into the tunnel for as far as she can see. She keeps eyeing it even as she finds one of the little wooden benches and sits down by herself. Sweat trickles. Even the wood underneath her radiates warmth.

After each train leaves, the subway is empty except for Carmen, and then about a minute later the first person descends from above until the slow trickle fills up the platform, then another train comes and clears it out again, and Carmen can’t help but think of the filling and draining of calcium in a synapse, the molecular beat of the thing; that this part of the city is like a chthonic alien organ with some opaque function. Occasionally the perceptive among those who pass notice with a quirk of interest the beautiful young woman planted in the middle of it all, biting at her fingernails, fanning herself, watching, waiting for something unknown and unsayable. And ever so often the automated voice addressed independently of listeners—“Stand clear of the closing doors, please.”

Eventually the people become less numerous. In the lateness of the night her mind begins to imagine scenarios, to play them out again and again on a loop, as if some part of her is daring something to happen, is waiting for something drastic. Instead the night just gets later and later and the people fewer and fewer, until finally entire trains are coming and going without the entrance or exit of a single soul. And Carmen is becoming half-terrified of the menacing long platform next to her, which extends into that subterranean realm . . . The scenario she imagines is that of a creature, something huge but lithe, something with an animal head, peeks from the side out onto the platform, a bull’s head maybe, leering at her, its mouth gaping and panting, its eyes impossibly dark and lewd upon her, and eventually the image becomes so strong, and the expectation so intense that she suddenly bolts from her wooden seat, pushing through the turnstiles and in her flight continually whipping around to look until she reaches the safety of the surface.

Carmen sticks to lighted paths all the way back to her apartment, deriding herself for being silly but also deeply glad when she arrives back in that cool safety and closes the door behind her, locking it. She is wiping the sweat from her brow, is adjusting the thermostat even further downward, when, turning, she pauses. Kierk’s Hello Kitty notebook sits on the seat of one of her kitchen chairs. It had somehow gone unnoticed, the sly thing. Kierk, in his rush, hadn’t taken it this morning. Or maybe she had unconsciously hidden it last night in her sleepy state? She picks it up gingerly and thumbs through the pages, blocky with text. It was strange that Kierk hasn’t contacted