Untimely #6 – Black Sheep

And the keening, the keening. He heard them in the tunnel, the sheep, and ran toward the sound, slowing to a walk around the corner where the tracks led into the blackness. Looking both ways, for trains, for guards, for crackheads and cops and nosy schoolchildren, and seeing none, he jumped, careful to avoid what he had oft heard spoken of as the third rail. Not knowing quite what the third rail was, he aimed for the middle of the tracks, the wooden crosshatches that ran eighteen inches apart, figuring that wood was about as bad a conductor as they came and surely the third rail would not run smack down the center? He landed squarely in the middle and bent his knees deep, hands held out fingers spread wide for balance, trying not to touch either of the metal rails, nor the rat shit and trash that festooned the tracks. Before him was a black puddle filled with batteries, behind a newspaper and six coffee cups, relics of a meeting? An impromptu platform chat, as around a watercooler, men in suits gathering to speak crudely of women’s nether regions and slap each other on their padded shoulders? His mind ran off but now, standing in the middle of the subway tracks, was not the time, and he called it back and began to walk in the direction of the bleating. The tunnel blackened quickly, the orange lights along the walls and pillars dividing the tracks into uptown and downtown, local and express, providing a dull glow in which to plod, trippingly, amongst the trash and machinery, the skeleton of the city, bare and tough and rusted. The sheep were louder now the sound was channeled by the lowered ceilings and his footsteps clanged from pillar to pillar sounding like an army advancing before and after. He hurried from hatch to hatch, terrified of tripping, terrified of the apocryphal third rail and the deathly ooze of battery acid and urine that was a distillation of the plague itself.

When he had got accustomed to the regular gaps between the hatches and could walk at a steady rate without first checking each step, he began to think of his great fortune. He had long heard tales of the underground flocks that grazed between stations along the old tunnels, the first ones, the very deepest, in which long ago a freight car had derailed, dumping dozens of fresh Vermont country sheep into the bowels of New York City. The sheep whose virgin wool was soon turned black by the dirt and soot and lack of sun, the fabled Manhattan Blackbacks, a kilo of whose wool would fetch far dearer than its equal weight in truffles. The flocks who had been known to block trains for hours as they grazed on the discarded trash of commuters or in moments of true daring stormed the garbage trains and eviscerated the carefully tied black bags teeming with chicken bones and hot dog buns and paper napkins. For paper was the sheeps greatest source of energy, their staple, like potatoes to the Irish and rice to the Indians and cassava to the Africans. What riders unthinkingly discarded by the ton was what fed this flock and let it grow so that unbeknownst to all but the conductors and maintenance workers and the enthusiasts there were no fewer than ten thousand adult Manhattan Blackbacks roaming the city’s abandoned tunnels. But of course this was just an estimate, for no one had ever actually seen a flock, let alone the full herd of migrating beasts. There had been the occasional spotting, a woolly bottom or the glint of a yellow eye staring from beneath a grating on seventy-second street one early morning just before dawn, when an elderly woman by the name of Mabel Gardener nearly slipped and broke her knee after stooping low to the grating to see just what it was her Fifi was barking at so frantically.

No, these were mythical beasts, except they were not—they were real. Except no one had ever been able to study one, no one had found their lair. Which is why, as he rounded the bend and the bleating began to reverberate deafeningly off the solid metal tunnel, Henry Forsythe held his breath and clenched his fists for eagerness. There was a pounding in his chest and he fought the desire to break into a mad sprint towards the sheep he knew were just around the bend. He must not scare them. He must approach them like a cat stalking its prey: patience was the essence. It was almost more than he could bear.