Moments later, both of them stood immersed up to their calves in water that didn't invite closer inspection, surrounded by the echoes of backwash down pipes deeper in the concrete maze, and the persistent squeaks of scurrying rats. A deathly chill permeated the cavern, and the direction choices at their front and back both narrowed through tight, claustrophobic tunnels. The ambient, clammy vapor stench of mildew and rot all around them was enough to gag.
Reality struck Richie as he looked up the shaft they had dropped down, a square of daylight visible twelve or fourteen feet above them.
"You planned that." Richie accused Cuppy.
"Maybe." Cuppy shrugged. "Anyway, you could throttle me if you wanted to, but then you'd be alone down here."
"You little-" Richie punched a wall. "...ow."
"C'mon." Cuppy beckoned, and started skipping down a random passage, whistling, a lantern dangling at his waist.
"Don't you dare leave me here!" Richie called after Cuppy, tailing him through a horribly cramped tube. The walls were slick with damp smudges and slime molds, a fact Richie couldn't ignore on account of the short height of the tunnel ceiling forcing him to put his palms against the surfaces for balance as he crouched, hunched over. His back was aching almost immediately, his knees feeling pushed up into his chest with each step. In those moments and minutes, who loathed and envied Cuppy for his short stature, and the effortless ease of travel through the sewer that it afforded him. Richie couldn't pause to catch his breath either, since Cuppy had their light source, and wasn't keen on taking it slowly. Richie made an awkward shuffle through their constricting environment as their feet splashed through a trickling stream of wastewater flowing downhill of them.
"We're going down a slight slope." Cuppy explained to Richie. "These pipes are engineered with the force of gravity in mind, to move the sewage and runoff through the place to its destination on the power of basic physics. You can follow the flow of wastewater to figure out which direction you're going like that. This junction leads deeper underground." he pointed to their right, at an L-shaped fork in the road. In front of them, a few feet further, the main tunnel was sealed off from entry by vertical iron bars, beyond which was a concrete wall with a chute running through a hole in its center, continuously spilling a green waterfall.
"Charming." Richie said.
Minutes passed by in silence save for the consistent splashing, and eventually the tunnels widened into a long set of chambers almost equal in size to a subway station. Here there were concrete sidewalks, accessible by stone steps slick with fetid slime, that took the boys out of the deepening stream of wastewater and gave them solid ground to dry their legs for a while.
"I hope you know how to navigate this shithole." Richie said somewhat nervously.
"Don't worry, my strings can find our way back out again." Cuppy said.
"Meaning?" Richie asked.
"They can kind of feel vibrations. I can stretch out their range like feelers to scope out things like acoustics, airflow direction, and echoes, as long as I can focus. I'd say we're about thirty or thirty five feet underground right now." Cuppy said.
Richie grimaced. "Can you do that with strings you've already detached? Can you feel the inside of my body with your sutures?"
"It's fainter, but a little. I can hear your heartbeat echoing if I listen closely." Cuppy said.
"I hate that with every fiber of my being." Richie said. "Anyway, have you seen enough yet? Can we get going now?"
Cuppy shook his head. "We just got here. The room got bigger, so we're in the areas maintenance workers come through to patch up pipes and remove clogs, stuff like that. See?" he pointed to a web of smaller pipes, like those connected directly to toilets, affixed to the walls and running down their lengths. "Up further is a manhole shaft and ladder for worker access. That means we're in the right place to look for critters, going by the rumors. One kid said he saw a big green hand reach up from an exposed manhole, grab a cat, and yank it in."
Richie looked up ahead at the arch where iron bars were planted into the escape route like giant staples, and saw a faint ring of light in the shape of a manhole cover's rim.
"That's an exit, you say?" Richie pointed at the ladder.
"Huh? Yeah." Cuppy said, folding an origami swan which he then placed daintily in the current at the curb's edge and watched it sail away.
The paper bird went right at a split in the tunnels.
"That way goes deeper into the sewer system." Cuppy pointed in the direction the swan had taken.
"And this way goes to the surface." Richie grasped the bottom rungs of the shaft ladder.
"Let's just go a little further. Please?" Cuppy begged with wide puppy dog eyes.
"How big was this alleged hand?" Richie asked.
"The green one? Well supposedly it was cut off from view from the wrist down, but big enough to fit the cat in its grip, fingers closed full-circle." Cuppy expanded upon the account.
"Yeah fuck that." Richie said, and started climbing.
Cuppy grabbed the tail of Richie's shirt. "Hang on a second."
"Fuck that. I see daylight now -" Richie pointed up at the sewer lid, "I don't need you to guide me anymore. There's nothing stopping me from throttling you. I'm going back up to daylit, clean conditions, you do what you want. Have fun playing in your confluent stream of Ebola and dysentery and shit."
"Tell ya what," Cuppy said, "let's go a little further together, and I'll buy you an ice cream cone."
Richie stopped. "Didn't you say you had no money?"
"I may have fibbed." Cuppy said.
"Why?" Richie asked.
"It was good for you. Ice cream, deal or no deal?" Cuppy asked.
"How can you think about a sweet-tooth in a place like this? Take your ice cream cone and shove it." Richie said.
"Two scoops." Cuppy said.
"No way." Richie replied.
"Three." Cuppy said.
"Not happening."
"Five?" Cuppy offered.
Richie locked eyes a long while, then started climbing back down the bars. "This had better not be another fib." Richie poked Cuppy's chest.
"Cross my heart and hope to die." Cuppy grinned.
Reluctantly, Richie followed as Cuppy led them down the fork in the road. There was almost a palpable sense of pressure increasing the further down they went, at first gradually, then at a sudden steep plunge when the walk came to a long downward staircase alongside the slope of the sewer pipe, which had become a drop-off. One pipe ended at a spout-like ledge, waterfalling a huge torrent of wastewater some dozens of meters down. At the bottom, there was a booming continuous roar like that of intense whitewater rapids, as the flow from various pipes funneling in from the four corners converged, the sewer stream becoming a raging river. An arched grate aperture under their feet where they crossed a rudimentary stone bridge issued forth what looked like the main body of the river from a tunnel cross-section somewhere perpendicular to where they had entered the system from. It carried a parade of miscellaneous junk, mostly fallen leaves and twigs, and a veritable soup of littered trash - candy wrappers, waterlogged newspapers, crumpled soda cans and plastic bottles, cigarette butts, illicitly flushed paper towels and tampons - anything and everything not caught in the narrow iron bars flowed rapidly down the river.
Cuppy thought of it as a warped Congo River, while it struck Richie, perhaps more accurately, as being akin to the River Styx at the boundary of Earth and the underworld of Hades.
“Christ, this river looks like it feeds straight down into the bowels of the earth.” Richie marveled, growing more uneasy and not knowing why.
“Should go to a treatment plant or an outflow pipe somewhere down the line. Let’s just hope it doesn’t drop off in the bay.” Cuppy whistled. “There’s an offshoot to the main passage up ahead, I think we should take it.”
Richie had the momentary mental image of a polluted dolphin with an empty cup-noodles container stuck to its head like a fez.
“Were you imagining something quirky?” Cuppy asked.
“No.” Richie said.
Squeezing single-file through the narrowing passage again, Richie felt progressively more fatigued, his muscles burning and his limbs aching. He figured it was likely just growing strain from shuffling through so many cramped, low-ceilinged tunnels, combined with the stress of the dark and alien environment.
“Ich, we got noxious fumes up ahead, gas masks on.” Cuppy signaled Richie as they passed through an area where the smells of sulphur and animal carcasses were steaming up from cracks in the ground at their feet.
Even through the mask, Richie could catch the pungent scent of things that made him want to vomit, a reflex restrained only out of the disgust of the idea of throwing up into his gasmask.
“Another fork in the road.” Cuppy indicated another tunnel running perpendicular to the one they now occupied. “We must be under the reservoir by now.”
“Last junction I’m checking out with you, that’s final.” Richie warned.
Cuppy didn’t answer him. He caught the glint of deep, hellish red in his visor, and stood in a momentary stupor as his eyes met the interior of the tunnel they straddled the entrance to. It was wider here again, and completely devoid of exposed wastewater streams. What was more, the entire stretch of hall - which seemed to go on forever into darkness in both directions beyond thirty or so yards - was stained in that sinister light, emanating from overhead phosphorescent fixtures protected by metal mesh coverings.
The petite boy slowly dropped his gas mask from his face, stepping into the tunnel and looking about it.
“Cup? What’s up?” Richie asked, thrown off by Cuppy’s lack of playful response or deadpan remark.
“I think I’ve been here before.” Cuppy held his chin.
The tunnel seemed vaguely metallic, and was marbled with covered cables running the length of it, stapled to the walls with big metal covers at measured intervals.
“We must be in some kind of maintenance tunnel. Do you think these circuits go to any of the electric power systems back on the surface?” Richie asked, trying to fill the suddenly uncomfortable silence.
“Huh? Oh, maybe.” Cuppy mumbled noncommittally.
The boy’s wide owl eyes were fixated on the tunnel and its dim red glow.
“What was it you said earlier, Richie?” Cuppy asked. “You think maybe I came out of one of those magical tunnels?”
What Cuppy himself had suggested earlier of the invading monsters possibly being parapsychological constructs escaping mankind’s collective imagination had come back to haunt him. Had his own subconscious naggings been the real reason he insisted they investigate the sewer? Looking at the familiar red tunnel now, it felt like he was very-nearly remembering a terrible - but forgotten - nightmare he had woken from.
Richie strode up beside Cuppy and noticed the sudden paleness of his face, accentuated by the red glow.
“Oh.” Richie said, the implications clicking for him. “You probably just saw this place as a kid, getting lost exploring or something. Maybe you have a parent who works with the electrical equipment down here? You have amnesia, but maybe your memories will come back to you and clear things up the more you see things that remind you, right?” Richie put a stilted, unsure hand on Cuppy’s shoulder.
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“Amnesia… right… I don’t remember anything before Station Bay.” Cuppy trailed off into silence for a few long moments.
Cuppy lifted his head suddenly, eyes sharp and focused, snapped out of their visible malaise.
“What is it?” Richie asked.
“My strings feel something coming.” Cuppy said, lowering his backpack in front of his waist, one hand resting at the half-unzipped opening.
The red lights began to flicker, along with Cuppy’s lantern, then both shorted out and plunged the boys into darkness. They weren’t bathed in black long before Richie felt his dragon runes stir to life, slithering and hissing at something yet unseen in the tunnel. They began glowing brilliant azure, illuminating the area about Richie and Cuppy in a small circle of visibility.
“Looks like these guys sense it too, whatever it is.” Richie grit his teeth.
A huge plume of fog uproariously expelled itself from the maintenance tunnel floor, cast in a ghastly horror movie color filter from the blue light of Richie’s dragons in contrast to the darkness around them.
“What the?!” Richie shrank back, stumbling backward into Cuppy, bumping the boy nearly onto his ass.
A smaller, fainter shadow than that of the pitch black around them beyond the small sphere of azure light was set into the center of the fog like the embryo of a transparent egg. That shadow began to solidify and darken, taking a definite shape. The form was squat and portly, body parts cartoonishly disproportionate to each other relative to the scale of an average human being. The whole of the entity stood maybe a foot or so high, of which a tall hat made up the last of, and then some. A neon flash of banded colors sprayed up across the fog, like a rainbow set against the misty sky in the aftermath of a heavy shower.
Cuppy’s eyes narrowed. “Huh?”
For just a moment, one that felt stretched out a very long time, Cuppy thought he made out the word “Feral” echoing inside his head, as if up from a deep chasm or well. On its heels was “Tracer”.
“Aye be nearly free, tis I be!” a sing-song voice, distorted by the thick fog and rainbow shadow, echoed out in a jolly falsetto.
Richie and Cuppy finally got a good look at the creature as his color set in a stronger contrast to the thinning fog cocoon wrapped around him. The thing was a very short man with a vivid, bright orange beard and matching hair tucked under a towering green hat with a black band and golden buckle, a color scheme echoed across the rest of his wardrobe - all green overcoat, black undershirt, green boots with golden buckles, and an excessive series of black belts across his sleeves, shoulders, chest, waist, thighs, and ankles. His features were dark and unruly, a vague sense of perversion and crudeness strewn about the little man’s aura.
Yet, the man’s appearance and sinister undertones were overwritten by the most glaring detail that Richie just couldn’t let go the moment he digested exactly what he was looking at.
“A… a leprechaun?” Richie said slowly, cautiously at first, but spilling the sentence fragment in its entirety with a slight elevation in the confidence of his tone halfway through. He crouched down eye-level to get a closer look.
A snort that he tried to suppress, then a snicker, then a volley of chuckles, and finally full blown laughter erupted from Richie.
“A fucking leprechaun?!? AHAHAHAHA!!!” Richie clutched at his stomach, slumping backward in a helpless fit of deep belly laughs against a wall.
The leprechaun sneered. “Laugh it up while yee can! Ima smack ya some respect when I get free o’ this here materialization bubble er whats’its!” he threatened squeakily, shaking a tiny fist at Richie.
The azure light caught the glint of a set of brass knuckles over the leprechaun’s fist in the moments before the disrupted power returned, and the tunnel lights flickered back on, casting the area in that infernal red again. A deep purple briefly shone where the tunnel lights and Richie’s dragon tattoos mingled together into a single color.
The diminutive fey of the Emerald Isle made his face bulge out in varicose veins and strain itself red with his racket, but the commotion had the opposite effect of intimidating Richie.
“Green munchkin! Real scary, big guy! What are you going to do? Bite my toes? Ahahaha!” Richie laughed himself breathless.
The leprechaun began jumping up and down in indignation, still sealed within his now mostly transparent bubble of fog. “Ooh, just you wait till I get out o’ here!”
“Sheesh, calm down, some people just can’t take a joke.” Richie said, scratching the back of his head.
He tried and failed to keep a straight face.
“I’m sorry, I can’t, how does someone mix up a troll with something like this little guy?!?” Richie brayed helpless laughter again.
“Forgive him, I think the fumes have gone to his head.” Cuppy rubbed his arm nervously. “Are you stuck in there, little guy?”
The leprechaun turned bright scarlet again. “I’s not little, ya wee shit! Big bluster be leaking out yer gobhole for a right foppish sprout like yee, savvy?”
Cuppy looked up at Richie expectantly.
“Nope, not any moonspeak I recognize.” Richie shrugged good-humouredly.
“Ooh, that tears it! Yer asses r’ grasses!” the leprechaun hollered.
Richie’s dragons began sniffing the air in the tunnel again. A second later, a red ring, thin at first but then growing bigger and thicker, encircled the leprechaun’s waist.
“Wha’sis?” the little man in green looked about his body in first confusion, followed by mounting dread as his body began to heat up unbearably. “Fire! Me’s on fire!” he shrieked as the ring tightened around his body, its edges indeed taking on the flickering appearance of leaping flames. The boys could feel the radiant heat in their faces even from where the little man stood trapped in all his one-foot glory.
The leprechaun scratched at the walls of his vaporal womb, desperate to escape it and the encasing fire. The single ring began to multiply and spread out into four, each locking around the fey’s body at his ankles, waist, chest, and face. The heat was rapidly intensifying, along with the depth of the red hellish glow around them.
“Oh dear, don’t worry little guy! We’ll get you out.” Cuppy promised the cantankerous leprechaun.
“Keep yer mits to yer’selves! Don’t look down on me fer me size, I’s king of beasts! Gonna pound ya into yer places, n’ flatten yer ugly faces!” the leprechaun promised in turn, spewing trash talk even through the pain of the escalating blaze.
Cuppy fired a grouping of five strings from his fingers, into the burning fog cloud and its four radiuses of strongest effect, snaring the leprechaun. Crossing his hands, Cuppy used his index and middle fingers like scissors, seamlessly snipping the strings like a hot knife through butter. In a clenched fist, which held the severed ends of the five strings, Cuppy conjured a tiny doll with a sock puppet look about it, similar in impression to a kind of voodoo doll. Releasing his grip, the doll - which suddenly resembled the leprechaun, having both put on sudden weight and facial hair along with a new green wardrobe - was yanked to the leprechaun himself as if by elastic cords pulled taut and then suddenly released.
In an instant, the leprechaun switched places with the small effigy in his likeness, leaving the look-alike doll to perish in the Tracer’s flames in his place. The four rings of fire enclosed around the top and bottom of the small bulb of fog now, then connected to each other and formed a single airtight seal of solid flame. The fog and the doll captured within were incinerated to nothingness, taking the flames themselves along to oblivion when it was all over.
The flesh and blood leprechaun was thrown onto his tiny, knobby knees on the tunnel floor, coughing and dusting soot from his wrinkled, hardlined leathery orange face.
“Are you ok?” Cuppy moved to put a hand on the little man’s shoulder.
The leprechaun gave a phlegmy, guttural sound of aggravation in turn, swatting and batting Cuppy’s hand away, and stood himself on his stumpy legs, the buckles of his boots making little sounds of clicking back into place. He whirled on the boys, face contorted in a snarl of anger and aggression, displaying horribly blackened decaying teeth in an obscene manic grin that clashed with his beady, furious eyes.
“Yer luck’s run out!” the leprechaun advanced on Cuppy, clanking his brass knuckles together and kicking off sparks.
Richie waltzed up to the little man, stepping between Cuppy and the leprechaun, and held his hands on his hips as he beamed down in amusement. “Our bad luck, you mean? I was expecting something way scarier than you.”
The leprechaun threw a vicious jab into Richie’s shin, denting it with bloody little divots and knocking loudly on bone. Richie’s eyes shot wide open, and his hands clutched down to his afflicted leg, gripping it with white-knuckled strain.
“Argh! You little bastard!” Richie grunted.
“Quit calling me little!” the leprechaun shook his fists, moving them around in tight little circle strokes in a boxing guard position about his face.
Cuppy pushed back past Richie to try to talk to the leprechaun again. “There’s no reason to fight, we-”
The leprechaun lifted a single index finger, upon which a small, glowing blue flame ignited like an eerie candlelight. “Don’t underestimate me, ye poppet!”
With a flicking motion, the leprechaun tossed the little flame just over Cuppy’s shoulder, catching a fold of his green cloak smoldering.
“Hey!” Cuppy beat at the smoking burn mark, slapping out the embers.
Richie righted himself, done clinging to his shin for now, and moved to grab the little man by his overstated lapels.
“Knock it off, you little shit!” Richie growled.
“Ye want some too, stringbean?!” the leprechaun growled, then smirked.
All ten grimy digits were set aflame.
“Saint Elmo’s Fire for everyone! It’s a party platter!” the leprechaun sang with mean-spirited glee.
Around the corner where the boys had entered the red-lit maintenance tunnel, a cluster of curious rats scattered, squeaking indignantly all of a sudden as flames and sparks ricocheted about the walls, dancing and whistling. Frantic footfalls echoed loudly down the tunnel as the boys fled from the pyromaniacal leprechaun, who gave immediate chase, bounding after them with big low-gravity moon-man-like strides and bounds, giving the impression that the entire tunnel floor was like one big trampoline under his boot-clad feet.
“S’wrong boys, don’t like me will-o-the-wisps? Heehaw!” the little fey brute bounced after them, cackling as blue flames danced at his fingertips.
“What’d we do?!” Cuppy called back desperately at their aggressor, even as Richie tugged him along to run faster by his dainty arm.
“Just ignore the little green puke, he’s not worth fighting! Just keep running!” Richie urged Cuppy.
“Oi, if yer not going to play by me rules, Ima break ‘em then! You can’t run all damn day, ye spineless cowards! Stand yer ground and face O’Gravy like real men!” the leprechaun taunted and jeered at them, gaining and losing ground variably by the arcs of his leaps.
“Can’t we just talk things out?” Cuppy turned back over his shoulder to yell out to O’Gravy.
“Don’t waste your breath, Cup, that shitty hobgoblin’s a psychotic walking napoleon complex!” Richie tried desperately to convince Cuppy to abandon his futile efforts.
Richie could feel his heart hammering in his chest, and taste iron on his tongue again. His body was aching and burning all over now, and there were painful cramps in his sides that were beginning to take their toll on his speed.
What’s going on? I can’t have used up that much stamina already, can I? Richie wondered.
“Have some lucky charms!” O’Gravy conjured fistfulls of talismans - four-leaf clovers, rabbit’s feet, and horseshoes - and flung them in scattershot pitches at the boys.
Wherever the folkloric symbols landed, they popped in small explosions like firecrackers, scuffing the floor, walls, and ceiling with soot and burning confetti debris.
“This is ridiculous, why do we have to run from something this dumb!” Richie lamented.
Even so, he didn’t want to stop and fight. The last time he decided to stand his ground and meet violence with violence, it got a man killed. Not an innocent man by any stretch, but he had already been beaten when the maniac with the claw hands raked open his belly, and the vagrant might have escaped that grisly fate had Richie just tried to run instead. All he could see when he tried to focus on the thought of turning and attacking was the gaping quartet of slash wounds ripped open across that poor man’s torso, sickly leaking blood in a cold pool around his mangled body.
Richie couldn’t do it, even if it meant saving his stubborn pride when this bouncy asshole deserved a good kick in the teeth anyway. Richie wasn’t like the clawed freak, he wanted no part of being a murderer.
The same Richie couldn’t say for sure of his dragon tattoos, which were glowing brightly and hissing, tugging at him to turn back and fight. They sensed a rival, and wanted to assert their dominance.
“Not now, you dumb snakes!” Richie barked at his runes.
The strain of his own cry hurt his chest and throat, and he felt he was about to collapse upon the tunnel floor, breathless and prone.
But by then, both Richie and Cuppy realized that the echoes of the explosions had already faded and stopped. They stopped running, cautiously, and looked back where O’Gravy had been on their heels moments ago. He was gone, and the tunnel empty.
“Did he give up?” Cuppy asked, perplexed.
Richie put up a finger for Cuppy to wait as he caught his breath, then finally stood, panting and body slick with glistening sweat and the fear-stink of chronic body odor cranked into overproduction by adrenaline.
“I don’t know. Just, don’t let your guard down. We have to go back that way and get to the manhole cover, there’s no telling how far this tunnel goes and I don’t want to risk anything on finding out. Let’s head back.” Richie said, and so they did.
They walked slowly, carefully, expecting at any moment that O’Gravy would come bounding out of the dark at them again, fists clutching explosive lucky charms in ample supply to throw in their faces - but no such thing happened. They breathed a collective sigh of relief, and relaxed their pace to that of a brisk walk back to the previous sewer chamber, and the exit shaft to the streets above.
However, when they crossed the archway from the maintenance tunnel to the sewer proper, they heard O’Gravy’s pig shriek at their backs, and above their heads.
“Peek-a-boo, I see you!” the leprechaun cackled, having sat himself on the narrow ledge offered by the upper rim of the empty door frame.
“Nothing up my sleeves!” he shrieked, raining more lucky charms on the boys, who scattered and darted to opposite sides to take cover from the crackles of explosives.
“Aw man, run!” Richie crossed the stone bridge over the raging sewer river, Cuppy at his back.
However, Cuppy stopped halfway across, fists balled up and eyes hidden under his blond curls. His face was set in a frown that was almost comical.
“Cup, what are you doing?!” Richie called back after him. “That little imp’s right behind you!”
“Yeah, I know.” Cuppy agreed.
The cloaked boy turned around to greet the bounding leprechaun, leaping across the bridge’s first half to meet him.
“Finally showing some backbone?” O’Gravy chortled in more obscene glee.
“Why don’t you -” Cuppy unfolded his fishing rod - which Richie now saw was collapsible to fit inside his backpack ordinarily - and swung it at O’Gravy. “- just pick on somebody your own size!”
The tiny silver hook gleamed, its barbs sparkling under Richie’s blue dragon glow, heralding the arrival of the red and white plastic float ball behind it, farther up the line. The ball smacked O’Gravy in the center of his face, cracking his nose in and chipping a rotten tooth, and the force of the smack sent him soaring back from whence he came in an arc not unlike those he had effortlessly jumped in just seconds and minutes prior. Richie stared agape as O’Gravy’s form disappeared into the darkness, and they both heard him slam back-first into a rusty sewer pipe lining the wall beyond the river.
“What the - that thing weighs more than it looks, doesn’t it?” Richie asked, stupefied.
“Forty pounds, on the dot.” Cuppy nodded.
“So, funsize weighs less than he looks too.” Richie breathed a sigh of relief. “Little fucker’s going to have a hell of a headache when he wakes up.” he signalled for the two of them to walk back across the bridge, toward the exit shaft.