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They shot him.”
    “You keep saying they shot him. You don’t mean that literally, do you?”
    “Yes. There was more gunfire that day than I ever heard of, anywhere, in a hundred years. Bombs, even.”
    “Hmm,” grunted Beardo, scratching his furry chin. “There just might be something to all this.” He stood up, setting the bridge swaying. “One thing, anyway,” he said, “you’ve earned a reprieve.” He slapped his knife back into its sheath. “Come with me. We’ll get your wounds cleaned up and feed you. Then you can tell your story to a friend of mine.”
    Beardo picked up his lantern and Frank followed him into one of the tunnels.

CHAPTER 4

    Alarmingly, the tunnel Beardo and Frank followed led
down.
The dim, shifty light cast by the old man’s lantern did little to dispel the darkness, and several times Frank heard anonymous scrabbling, splashing and low moans echo out of side corridors. Beardo held his drawn knife in his right hand and tapped it against the damp brick walls as he led Frank along.
    “Why are you doing that?” Frank whispered.
    “It shows any hole-lurkers that we’re armed. Got to let ‘em know we mean business.”
    Good God, Frank thought. I wonder what sort of creatures lurk in these holes. In spite of himself, Frank began thinking of tentacles and green, fanged faces under old slouch hats.
    “Good sirs! Good sirs!” came a wheezing voice from the blackness ahead, causing Frank to start violently. “A penny to see a dancing dog?”
    “No,” rasped Beardo, advancing on the voice. “We don’t want to see a dancing dog.”
    Frank peered ahead over Beardo’s shoulder and saw an old person of indeterminate sex, as withered and dark as a dried apple. The figure was slumped against the wall as though it had been thrown there dead, but one upraised skeletal hand held crossed sticks from which dangled a malodorous puppet. Frank looked more closely at it and saw that it was the dried corpse of a dog.
    “Just keep walking,” whispered Beardo to Frank. “I’ve seen this one before.”
    The old puppeteer began to sing, and Frank knew it was a woman. “Tirra lee, tirra lee, dance hound,” she crooned, and jiggled the horrible puppet merrily. Beardo stepped around her, smiling ingratiatingly. Frank followed, also attempting to smile.
    “Beardo, by the stars!” the old woman exclaimed. “You’ll give me some money, now, eh?”
    “Certainly, soon as I get some,” replied the old man, walking on down the tunnel and pulling Frank by the wrist.
    “Soon as you
get
some? Damn your treacherous eyes!” the woman brayed. She struggled to her feet and stumbled after them for a few paces, flailing Frank’s back with her mummified dog, before sinking exhausted to the flagstones once more. “A penny to see a dancing dog?” she inquired of the darkness.
    Beardo’s home was an abandoned section of a spiral stairwell, left over from God-knew-what derelict subway system. The old man hung his lantern on a wall peg and touched a match to three kerosene lamps; the comparatively bright light enabled Frank to see the place in some detail. The shaft was roughly twenty-five feet from stone floor to boarded-up roof, and the ascending iron stairs circled the shaft twice before disappearing beyond the boards of the ceiling. Stacks of books, chipped statues, rusted ironmongery and clothes lined the outer edges of the stairs, with the other half, near the wall, left clear for ascending and descending. In the middle of the floor was a sunken tub in whose murky waters several large toads sported.
    “Well, Frankie lad, what think you of the old homestead, eh?” asked Beardo, unscrewing the lid of a coffee jar.
    Even in his cold, wet state, Frank could see that Beardo fairly radiated the homeowners pride, so he answered tactfully. “It’s beautiful, Mr. Tame. A regular palace. I didn’t know underground homes were so … roomy.”
    “Hardly any of them are, Frank. This is one of the finest