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was just curious about what was new in Oz. Now I'm superficial, hasty, and biased."
     
     
"Know thyself."
     
     
I laughed. "All right. I guess that's fair in a way. So you tell me. What sort of person are you?"
     
     
"A person who admires whimsy. You know, of all the delights of L. Frank Baum, I think whimsy was the most important. Remember the Gump, from The Land of Oz ? He was a flying creature made up of two sofas, some leaves from a potted palm, and the stuffed head of an elklike animal? Wonderful!" He smiled. "People rarely do whimsy anymore. Nowadays it's all plotting or characterization or— gasp! —social significance."
     
     
I said, "I would think a security specialist like you would prefer reality."
     
     
"If you can build a safe reality, you will have time and space for your whimsy. But I like this work. I'm very happy to have this job. My company needs it badly, if we're going to survive. Still, the festival is quite commercial. And there's something a little non-Oz about that."
     
     
"Commercial? Of course. Somebody has to pay for all this. How would you get people to put up Flying Monkey merry-go-rounds if they weren't at least being paid for their work?"
     
     
"I understand the problem. Somebody has to pay me and my staff, after all. I just wonder—"
     
     
"What?"
     
     
"Whether the right people are making the decisions."
     
     
    * * *
The Oz Festival was going to be a big credit for his company? Oh, lord! Now he was dead and the festival had a killer loose. I suppose it's a good thing we don't know what's lying in wait for us.
     
     
Thinking about Plumly, I wished now that I could introduce Jeremy to him, to show him that, however commercial the festival might be, a child loved it. Too late.
     
     
    * * *
Down in the tunnel, I cuddled Jeremy. The silhouette up in the lighted end, the vague figure that reminded me of the Tin Woodman, moved, his head angling as if looking into the shaft. He couldn't possibly see us, because we were in darkness, but he suspected we were here.
     
     
The figure was distorted by the odd perspective, us looking up through a tunnel at him. Also the shape was illuminated from the back with yellow Winkie-country light so it was impossible to see features.
     
     
I couldn't even begin to guess whether it was Barry or not, or even a man or a woman.
     
     
I whispered into the child's ear, "Jeremy, be very quiet, and take my hand. We're going to move out of here."
     
     
He did exactly what I told him. What a good little guy he was. We walked carefully, first along the level area, then down another slope, watching out for trash and mud, both of which increased in quantity as we went downward.
     
     
The slope was gentle, though, and even after five minutes of picking our way, we were probably only ten or fifteen feet below the ground surface. That was my best guess, but it was terribly hard to tell.
     
     
On a level floor again, Jeremy and I felt our way into a smaller tunnel that led off the big sloping one. There were concrete groins here, and they formed alcoves behind themselves that offered shallow hiding places. The light from the outside hardly reached us. The damp air smelled horrible.
     
     
"Aunt Cat," Jeremy whispered in my ear, "I don't like this place."
     
     
"Neither do I, but let's wait here just a few minutes and see if the bad guy gives up and goes away."
     
     
After a couple of minutes something altered. The distant light, now barely visible far off, changed in intensity. Someone was moving through the tunnel.
     
     
Jeremy and I slipped into one of the alcoves and found that it had a still smaller space behind it formed by an old iron pillar. These iron supports are all over Chicago— under Chicago, really— because the city was built on what had been a swamp. In the late 1800s, many of the downtown streets were raised above swamp level on cast-iron stilts, the roadways and sidewalks laid over iron grids. In the century since then,