Book One In The Ahh-Ness Of Things Series: April & Donnie were once inseparable, but now almost six years have passed since she left NYC. What if April O'Neil could set the record straight, once & for all! The only girl down enough to chill with the...
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He walked ahead of me without another word, to a kind of doorway just beyond the hill of bricks. I could see there was light beyond an opening in the wall. It was like being in basement & someone had a candle burning in the space around the corner. He waited for me but I couldn't follow. The words he had spoken, were searing through me. I had never felt so desperate for understanding.
"April. We're here."
He motioned for me to come to him.
"You've been all over the world & you write about all these human atrocities, but you don't even know what's going on here with your own family, and you of all people you should be the one telling the world about this!"
I stepped close to his side, cautiously. I damn well knew there were dozens of possibilities waiting for me, but what I saw beyond the doorway, was nothing I could have ever imagined. I knew exactly where we were, yet everything had changed. We were standing on a rock ledge & over the threshold, below us; was the long ago remnants of an Irish borough from the mid 1800s. Almost two hundred years ago, the residents had been completely decimated by cholera, then typhus. Finally snow storms had caused several structures to collapse, & because Irish immigrants were less than human, the people of New York had built over it; wiping away the "filthy" residence of people they wished would move on. These were my father's ancestors.
How many times had we stood on this ledge; all of these memories came back in an instant. Hand in hand, walking here in love, running away in anger. The waterfall was still cascading down into the natural, clear running stream. A multitude of tiny, little birds still flew across the underground sky. Centuries old storefronts & tenements, there were small trees, even the little bridge that led into the diminutive courtyard. This was The Undercity.
We had talked here for hours, as children, wandering through the rooms & stairwells; pretending it was our own little world. What was different now, was that it was full of people! Most of them, that I could see, standing high up over head; were mutants. The whole underground chamber was littered with the indications of people living & moving about, within it. I could see flickering lights & buzzing neon glowing throughout rows of staggered windows & narrow alleyways. You could tell where the original structures had been & where it had been built on to, creating more living spaces, because these were made of ply wood & large sheets of scrap metal. It was both charming & unsettling. You could smell the decay of garbage & waste in the air over the rush of mist from the waterfall's spray. You could hear children laughing & some crying, people coughing & carrying on, television voices, clatter; all over the low echoing roar of the water.
