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I stepped onto the subway tracks and followed someone into the dark and something in the dark followed me back
I’ve never been one of those bleeding hearts who walked from train car to train car handing out sandwiches to the homeless, those self gratifying, holier-than-thou posers. What were they going to do with two slices of white bread and a slice of fake cheese?
I was a Case Manager for the Department of Social Services. I dealt in logistics and in bed allotments and I prided myself on my ability to look at a screaming man smeared in his own feces and feel nothing, smell nothing, want nothing except to process his file.
You see, the quality you want in a social worker isn’t empathy, that's a dime a dozen. What you *needed* was efficiency. There are over 200,000 homeless people in New York at any given moment and they outnumbered us, the social workers, 5 to 1. Unlike those reverse panhandlers, I knew efficiency was the grease that kept the gears turning and that was why I got promoted to Senior Case Manager only one year into the job.
A few years after my promotion though and I’m sleeping in a box behind a bodega in Astoria, shivering my ass off because the wind coming off the East River grows teeth in the winter. I smell like a wet dog and I look worse. I know this. When people walk by me they avert their eyes, or try really hard to not see me in the first place.
This is all because of Magda.
I’d first met Magda in the police station. She was a semi-permanent fixture in the Union Square station. You know her type: layers of mismatched wool coats all four seasons of the year, legs wrapped in plastic bags and pushing a cart filled with garbage. She was picked up for aggressive panhandling and disturbing the peace. Magda had been screaming at tourists and passersby for years but that day one of those passersby had been a cop and so she’d become my problem.
"We’re going to get you into a shelter, Magda," I said, clicking my pen. "We have a bed tonight in the Bronx."
"No!" She yelled, slamming a dirt-caked hand on the table.
*Of course not. Why make it easy?*
“It’s too far!” she continued, projecting crumbs and spittle all over me and the police interrogation desk. “I have to go back. I have to stay close to my boys. You can’t make me leave." I wiped my face.
Her files did say she’d had two dependents at some point, no clue where they are now but they weren’t in the tunnels of Union Square Station.
"I *can* make you leave Magda. It’s literally my job." That’s not true. My job was technically to find her a place to stay but realistically you take the difference and settle on just keeping people like her out of sight.
"The mole people," she said, leaning in. "They want my boys. They’ll go hungry and they’ll gobble my boys right up."
*God damn, not this again.*
You’d be surprised but Magda’s “situation” is actually pretty cliche. You see, it’s surprisingly hard to end up *homeless* homeless in New York. There’s a constant game of musical chairs with the city funded shelters and we do a pretty good job of filtering out the “down on your luck” from the “batshit crazy” so unless you were truly, clinically insane, you had a pretty good shot at getting yourself out of whatever hole you’d dug yourself into.
But that just means, like the unpopped kernels in a bucket of popcorn, the really crazy ones all ended up at the bottom.
And I'm no psychologist but I knew paranoid schizophrenia when I saw it. Seriously, her story wasn’t even that original: lost her kids, became crazy (or the other way around) and now she blames everything on a fictional society of people living in abandoned subway tunnels. It’s what you get when you mixed urban legends with actual trauma and simmered it all in mental illness. Could happen to the best of us, right?
But Magda was persistent. Over the next week, she escaped two shelters. Each time the NYPD found her trying to pry open maintenance doors in the subway. Sick and tired of being called in the middle of the day to clean up her bullshit, I had the brilliant idea to go down to the platform where she "lived" and do a field assessment. I had a feeling if I found an excuse to “lose” Magda near the Union Square station, she’d at least stop wasting my time. I told myself it’s what she wanted and the fact that it happens to work out for me was just a coincidence.
So about 10:00 PM on a Tuesday I took Magda on a field trip. The Union Square platform was uncharacteristically empty. I’d taken Magda near the end of the track and made sure nobody was watching us.
Just releasing a wild animal back into the wild, I thought to myself. This is what she wanted.
She looked at me with clear eyes and genuine worry in her voice. "They are hungry tonight. Listen. I can’t leave them to that."
Maybe it’s the way she said it but something in her voice made my heart ache. Her boys were gone. I knew that, but what did it say about her as a mother that when the world had taken everything else away that this is what she clung to? To everyone else, she was just human detritus, not much different from the rats that scurried around in the dark, but once upon a time she’d been a mother. Still is, in a way.
She hopped off the platform and waddled off into the darkness and I was alone.
To this day, I can’t tell you what changed my mind. Some people say empathy is like a muscle that you use or you lose and I haven’t had to use mine in a long, long time. But that night I must’ve had a cramp.
"Magda! Get back here!"
I pulled out my phone, turned on the flashlight, jumped onto the tracks and chased after her.
"Magda, stop," I hissed.
Each step took me further from the platform, and the sounds of the station began to fade. Soon only the light that kept the darkness at bay was the cheap LED from my phone. It glowed dimly in the gloom, illuminating swirling dust motes that looked like thick, floating spores.
"Just a little further," she called back.
What the hell am I doing?
A breeze came down the tunnel and the air changed. It was cooler, heavier. I take the subway twice a day, I’ve stared into the darkness ahead waiting for the train to come as if that would make it come any faster. But for the first time, I felt the darkness staring back.
Then I saw the bedding.
Piles of rags. Mounds of refuse and rat droppings and empty cans. I shone my light on the trash, human food.
*You’ve got to be kidding me*, I thought.
*You’ve got to be kidding me*, said a voice from the darkness.
I flinched back, my heart jumped into my throat and something grabbed my arm from behind.
It was Magda.
"You see?" Magda whispered, "They’ve had nothing to eat since the coppers took me."
"Squatters," I said, though my voice trembled. "It’s just squatters, Magda. Dangerous ones. We need to leave."
*We need to leave*, the voice said again.
I froze. "What did you say?"
Magda cackled and scurried away and I chased after her.
The voice wasn't hers. It was mine and it felt like it was coming from inside my head.
"The acoustics," I muttered, trying to rationalize. *It's just an echo.*
*It* is *an echo*, said the walls.
"Stop it," I snapped.
Magda appeared behind me and it made me jump.
“Shhhh” said Magda with a finger to her lips, she grabbed my wrist with her other hand and drew me to her. She whispered “We are close."
"To the squatters?" I pulled my hand away.
She leaned in close to me and the beam of my flashlight caught her face.
Her expression was blank and unamused and, like a lightswitch, her face turned into a crazed, too-wide smile with too many teeth.
“To my boys” she said and opened her mouth to let out a cackle and her mouth kept opening.
The jaw unhinged with a sound like snapping bones.
I stumbled back in panic and dropped my phone. The light spun wildly, strobing against the tunnel walls, and in those flashes, I saw movement, figures hiding in the dark.
I turned, scrambled to my feet and ran.
*Run!* my mind whispered. *Run, Arthur!*
Hearing my name broke me.
I ran blindly. The air stank of stale rotten meat and took in big gulps as I half ran half crawled in the dark. I had nothing to guide me but my fear. My feet splashed in the stagnant water between the tracks and I heard the slap of wet skin on concrete from behind me. A wild cackle reverberated down the tunnel.
Don't look back, I thought.
Don't look back, the tunnel mocked. Look at us. Look at us.
I looked back and I saw Magda on the ceiling of the tunnel, crawling towards me like a spider.
My foot caught on a railroad tie, and I went down hard. My knee cracked against the steel rail. I screamed, and my scream was swallowed by the darkness, then spat back at me by a thousand voices.
*We’re coming Arthur!* They were in my head.
I wasn't hallucinating. I know what hallucinations are; these words came to me like I was remembering the lyrics to a song, I could hear and not hear. They were making me think the words, their words.
I scrambled on all fours and I began to sob. My hand squelched into something soft and warm. I ignored it and crawled on hands and knees through the trash and muck.
Ahead, a faint, sickly orange light.
A maintenance hatch.
I saw a rusted iron gate at the top of a crumbling staircase. It was chained but there was light.
I hit the stairs, taking them two at a time. I could hear the slapping of wet flesh against cold tiles.
I threw my shoulder against the gate. It groaned.
Stay, Arthur, the voices chorused. We’re hungry.
"No!" I shrieked, slamming my body against the iron again.
I looked back again.
Magda was at the bottom of the stairs, crawling up the stairs, her neck twisted at a ninety-degree angle.
"Arthur," she gargled. "They're just hungry. Let my boys eat."
She reached out and grabbed my ankle and pulled, my broken knee burned with white hot pain. Her grip was wet and strong, her arms looked too long and too pale.
I kicked and it skimmed off the top of her head but I felt her flesh come off, it was soft like it had rotted on her bones.
She roared with anger and bit down on my ankle and I screamed. I kicked again, this time my heel connected with her face. Her face caved in like it was made of wet clay and she let go with a hiss.
I threw myself at the gate one last time. The ancient chain snapped.
I burst through, tumbling onto pavement.
I rolled, scraping my skin raw on the asphalt, and curled into a ball, waiting for the teeth.
But there was only the sound of traffic.
I opened my eyes. I was on a side street in the Lower East Side. A yellow taxi honked at me. A group of hipsters smoking outside a bar stared.
I was covered in black slime. My suit was torn. I was bleeding.
"Help me," I croaked. "Please, help me."
One of the hipsters flicked his cigarette butt near my head. "Jesus fucking bath salts Christ. Don’t fucking touch me."
They laughed and walked away.
I tried to stand, but my legs wouldn't work, I had broken a knee and then ran on it for god knows how far. My ankle bled where Magda had dug in her teeth, the flesh torn and ragged like it was chewed by rocks. I dragged myself to a streetlight, desperate for the artificial glare. People stepped over me without even glancing down.
That was two years ago.
I never went back to my apartment. I don’t know why. No one came looking for me either.
I lost my job. I lost my savings. I lost my name.
Now I stay in Queens. The subway runs above ground here. The N train rattles overhead on the elevated tracks, safe in the air. I never go into the city.
Every time I walk over a subway grate and feel that warm, stale air blow up I can smell that same stale rotting smell.
I don't sleep much. When I do, I hear my own thoughts echoing back to me, but in a voice that is and isn't mine.
Last night, I found a new spot to sleep, under the expressway. It was dry. It was quiet. But it wasn’t safe. Nowhere is safe.
I can still feel them in my mind, they’ve known since that night, they are always with me now. They get louder when I get close and so I never cross the river. But there’s a pull, like gravity, I can feel it.
They whisper to me, they are waiting for me to come back, to wander too close to the dark.
So next time you’re alone on the platform and staring into the darkness wondering when the train will come, stay far from the edge. You never know what might reach out and grab you.
#entertainment
source
I’ve never been one of those bleeding hearts who walked from train car to train car handing out sandwiches to the homeless, those self gratifying, holier-than-thou posers. What were they going to do with two slices of white bread and a slice of fake cheese?
I was a Case Manager for the Department of Social Services. I dealt in logistics and in bed allotments and I prided myself on my ability to look at a screaming man smeared in his own feces and feel nothing, smell nothing, want nothing except to process his file.
You see, the quality you want in a social worker isn’t empathy, that's a dime a dozen. What you *needed* was efficiency. There are over 200,000 homeless people in New York at any given moment and they outnumbered us, the social workers, 5 to 1. Unlike those reverse panhandlers, I knew efficiency was the grease that kept the gears turning and that was why I got promoted to Senior Case Manager only one year into the job.
A few years after my promotion though and I’m sleeping in a box behind a bodega in Astoria, shivering my ass off because the wind coming off the East River grows teeth in the winter. I smell like a wet dog and I look worse. I know this. When people walk by me they avert their eyes, or try really hard to not see me in the first place.
This is all because of Magda.
I’d first met Magda in the police station. She was a semi-permanent fixture in the Union Square station. You know her type: layers of mismatched wool coats all four seasons of the year, legs wrapped in plastic bags and pushing a cart filled with garbage. She was picked up for aggressive panhandling and disturbing the peace. Magda had been screaming at tourists and passersby for years but that day one of those passersby had been a cop and so she’d become my problem.
"We’re going to get you into a shelter, Magda," I said, clicking my pen. "We have a bed tonight in the Bronx."
"No!" She yelled, slamming a dirt-caked hand on the table.
*Of course not. Why make it easy?*
“It’s too far!” she continued, projecting crumbs and spittle all over me and the police interrogation desk. “I have to go back. I have to stay close to my boys. You can’t make me leave." I wiped my face.
Her files did say she’d had two dependents at some point, no clue where they are now but they weren’t in the tunnels of Union Square Station.
"I *can* make you leave Magda. It’s literally my job." That’s not true. My job was technically to find her a place to stay but realistically you take the difference and settle on just keeping people like her out of sight.
"The mole people," she said, leaning in. "They want my boys. They’ll go hungry and they’ll gobble my boys right up."
*God damn, not this again.*
You’d be surprised but Magda’s “situation” is actually pretty cliche. You see, it’s surprisingly hard to end up *homeless* homeless in New York. There’s a constant game of musical chairs with the city funded shelters and we do a pretty good job of filtering out the “down on your luck” from the “batshit crazy” so unless you were truly, clinically insane, you had a pretty good shot at getting yourself out of whatever hole you’d dug yourself into.
But that just means, like the unpopped kernels in a bucket of popcorn, the really crazy ones all ended up at the bottom.
And I'm no psychologist but I knew paranoid schizophrenia when I saw it. Seriously, her story wasn’t even that original: lost her kids, became crazy (or the other way around) and now she blames everything on a fictional society of people living in abandoned subway tunnels. It’s what you get when you mixed urban legends with actual trauma and simmered it all in mental illness. Could happen to the best of us, right?
But Magda was persistent. Over the next week, she escaped two shelters. Each time the NYPD found her trying to pry open maintenance doors in the subway. Sick and tired of being called in the middle of the day to clean up her bullshit, I had the brilliant idea to go down to the platform where she "lived" and do a field assessment. I had a feeling if I found an excuse to “lose” Magda near the Union Square station, she’d at least stop wasting my time. I told myself it’s what she wanted and the fact that it happens to work out for me was just a coincidence.
So about 10:00 PM on a Tuesday I took Magda on a field trip. The Union Square platform was uncharacteristically empty. I’d taken Magda near the end of the track and made sure nobody was watching us.
Just releasing a wild animal back into the wild, I thought to myself. This is what she wanted.
She looked at me with clear eyes and genuine worry in her voice. "They are hungry tonight. Listen. I can’t leave them to that."
Maybe it’s the way she said it but something in her voice made my heart ache. Her boys were gone. I knew that, but what did it say about her as a mother that when the world had taken everything else away that this is what she clung to? To everyone else, she was just human detritus, not much different from the rats that scurried around in the dark, but once upon a time she’d been a mother. Still is, in a way.
She hopped off the platform and waddled off into the darkness and I was alone.
To this day, I can’t tell you what changed my mind. Some people say empathy is like a muscle that you use or you lose and I haven’t had to use mine in a long, long time. But that night I must’ve had a cramp.
"Magda! Get back here!"
I pulled out my phone, turned on the flashlight, jumped onto the tracks and chased after her.
"Magda, stop," I hissed.
Each step took me further from the platform, and the sounds of the station began to fade. Soon only the light that kept the darkness at bay was the cheap LED from my phone. It glowed dimly in the gloom, illuminating swirling dust motes that looked like thick, floating spores.
"Just a little further," she called back.
What the hell am I doing?
A breeze came down the tunnel and the air changed. It was cooler, heavier. I take the subway twice a day, I’ve stared into the darkness ahead waiting for the train to come as if that would make it come any faster. But for the first time, I felt the darkness staring back.
Then I saw the bedding.
Piles of rags. Mounds of refuse and rat droppings and empty cans. I shone my light on the trash, human food.
*You’ve got to be kidding me*, I thought.
*You’ve got to be kidding me*, said a voice from the darkness.
I flinched back, my heart jumped into my throat and something grabbed my arm from behind.
It was Magda.
"You see?" Magda whispered, "They’ve had nothing to eat since the coppers took me."
"Squatters," I said, though my voice trembled. "It’s just squatters, Magda. Dangerous ones. We need to leave."
*We need to leave*, the voice said again.
I froze. "What did you say?"
Magda cackled and scurried away and I chased after her.
The voice wasn't hers. It was mine and it felt like it was coming from inside my head.
"The acoustics," I muttered, trying to rationalize. *It's just an echo.*
*It* is *an echo*, said the walls.
"Stop it," I snapped.
Magda appeared behind me and it made me jump.
“Shhhh” said Magda with a finger to her lips, she grabbed my wrist with her other hand and drew me to her. She whispered “We are close."
"To the squatters?" I pulled my hand away.
She leaned in close to me and the beam of my flashlight caught her face.
Her expression was blank and unamused and, like a lightswitch, her face turned into a crazed, too-wide smile with too many teeth.
“To my boys” she said and opened her mouth to let out a cackle and her mouth kept opening.
The jaw unhinged with a sound like snapping bones.
I stumbled back in panic and dropped my phone. The light spun wildly, strobing against the tunnel walls, and in those flashes, I saw movement, figures hiding in the dark.
I turned, scrambled to my feet and ran.
*Run!* my mind whispered. *Run, Arthur!*
Hearing my name broke me.
I ran blindly. The air stank of stale rotten meat and took in big gulps as I half ran half crawled in the dark. I had nothing to guide me but my fear. My feet splashed in the stagnant water between the tracks and I heard the slap of wet skin on concrete from behind me. A wild cackle reverberated down the tunnel.
Don't look back, I thought.
Don't look back, the tunnel mocked. Look at us. Look at us.
I looked back and I saw Magda on the ceiling of the tunnel, crawling towards me like a spider.
My foot caught on a railroad tie, and I went down hard. My knee cracked against the steel rail. I screamed, and my scream was swallowed by the darkness, then spat back at me by a thousand voices.
*We’re coming Arthur!* They were in my head.
I wasn't hallucinating. I know what hallucinations are; these words came to me like I was remembering the lyrics to a song, I could hear and not hear. They were making me think the words, their words.
I scrambled on all fours and I began to sob. My hand squelched into something soft and warm. I ignored it and crawled on hands and knees through the trash and muck.
Ahead, a faint, sickly orange light.
A maintenance hatch.
I saw a rusted iron gate at the top of a crumbling staircase. It was chained but there was light.
I hit the stairs, taking them two at a time. I could hear the slapping of wet flesh against cold tiles.
I threw my shoulder against the gate. It groaned.
Stay, Arthur, the voices chorused. We’re hungry.
"No!" I shrieked, slamming my body against the iron again.
I looked back again.
Magda was at the bottom of the stairs, crawling up the stairs, her neck twisted at a ninety-degree angle.
"Arthur," she gargled. "They're just hungry. Let my boys eat."
She reached out and grabbed my ankle and pulled, my broken knee burned with white hot pain. Her grip was wet and strong, her arms looked too long and too pale.
I kicked and it skimmed off the top of her head but I felt her flesh come off, it was soft like it had rotted on her bones.
She roared with anger and bit down on my ankle and I screamed. I kicked again, this time my heel connected with her face. Her face caved in like it was made of wet clay and she let go with a hiss.
I threw myself at the gate one last time. The ancient chain snapped.
I burst through, tumbling onto pavement.
I rolled, scraping my skin raw on the asphalt, and curled into a ball, waiting for the teeth.
But there was only the sound of traffic.
I opened my eyes. I was on a side street in the Lower East Side. A yellow taxi honked at me. A group of hipsters smoking outside a bar stared.
I was covered in black slime. My suit was torn. I was bleeding.
"Help me," I croaked. "Please, help me."
One of the hipsters flicked his cigarette butt near my head. "Jesus fucking bath salts Christ. Don’t fucking touch me."
They laughed and walked away.
I tried to stand, but my legs wouldn't work, I had broken a knee and then ran on it for god knows how far. My ankle bled where Magda had dug in her teeth, the flesh torn and ragged like it was chewed by rocks. I dragged myself to a streetlight, desperate for the artificial glare. People stepped over me without even glancing down.
That was two years ago.
I never went back to my apartment. I don’t know why. No one came looking for me either.
I lost my job. I lost my savings. I lost my name.
Now I stay in Queens. The subway runs above ground here. The N train rattles overhead on the elevated tracks, safe in the air. I never go into the city.
Every time I walk over a subway grate and feel that warm, stale air blow up I can smell that same stale rotting smell.
I don't sleep much. When I do, I hear my own thoughts echoing back to me, but in a voice that is and isn't mine.
Last night, I found a new spot to sleep, under the expressway. It was dry. It was quiet. But it wasn’t safe. Nowhere is safe.
I can still feel them in my mind, they’ve known since that night, they are always with me now. They get louder when I get close and so I never cross the river. But there’s a pull, like gravity, I can feel it.
They whisper to me, they are waiting for me to come back, to wander too close to the dark.
So next time you’re alone on the platform and staring into the darkness wondering when the train will come, stay far from the edge. You never know what might reach out and grab you.
#entertainment
source
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