The Gods Below State Street

The thing about gods is that they tip like shit.

This is something Rae Kowalski had learned over nine years behind the bar at Dempsey’s, a narrow brick-and-brass establishment on Wabash Avenue that had outlasted prohibition, two fires, and the complete economic collapse of the neighborhood on either side of it. Dempsey’s endured. The gods came in on Tuesdays and Thursdays, mostly, and they nursed their drinks and they argued about the old country — whichever old country that happened to be — and they left coins on the bar that were sometimes legal tender and sometimes not.

She didn’t know they were gods, not at first. She thought they were just the usual neighborhood characters. Every bar has them. The old Polish guy who drinks Zywiec and doesn’t talk. The woman with the neck tattoo who orders bourbon neat and reads newspapers in a language the bartender can’t identify. The man who smells faintly of woodsmoke and pays in cash that’s always a little damp.

Rae had been tending bar since she was twenty-three, which she’d fallen into the way people fall into things in Chicago — through a cousin who knew a guy, and a winter that wouldn’t end, and the realization that her degree in comparative religion from DePaul was worth approximately the paper it was printed on. She was good at the job. She had the bartender’s essential talent: the ability to listen to a person talk without actually hearing them.

It was Yevgeny who told her. Or rather, it was Yevgeny who let it slip, which is a different thing. He was four Zywiecs deep on a Thursday in November, and the bar was otherwise empty — even the regular gods had stayed home, driven off by a freezing rain that was turning the sidewalks into a skating rink. Yevgeny was talking about the tunnels.

“You know the freight tunnels,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

“Under the Loop,” Rae said. “Sure.” Everyone in Chicago knew about the freight tunnels, at least in theory. Forty miles of narrow-gauge railway built at the turn of the last century to haul coal and mail and garbage underneath the city streets. They’d been abandoned for decades, flooded in ‘92 when someone punched a hole in the riverbed. Dark and wet and full of nothing anyone wanted.

“Not full of nothing,” Yevgeny said, and something in his voice made her look up from the glass she was polishing.

His eyes were wrong. They had been brown all evening, the same mud-brown they’d been for the three years he’d been coming in, and now they were the color of a January sky over Lake Michigan — pale, flat, enormous. A color that didn’t belong in a human skull.

“Yevgeny,” she said carefully.

“My name,” he said, “is not Yevgeny.” He took a long drink of his beer. “But it will do. The tunnels are not empty, Rae. They are full of us. The ones who came over and were forgotten. The ones whose churches became condominiums. Whose shrines became parking garages. Whose names the grandchildren don’t know anymore.”

“You’re drunk,” she said.

“I am drunk,” he agreed. “I am also a god. These things are not mutually exclusive.”

The gods of Chicago lived in the freight tunnels the way rats live in the walls — present, numerous, and ignored. They had been arriving since the city was founded, carried in the hearts and hymns of every group that came: the Irish and the Poles and the Swedes, the Italians and the Greeks and the Lithuanians, the Mexicans and the Chinese and the Nigerians. Every immigrant wave brought its gods along, packed in with the suitcases and the languages and the recipes, and for a generation or two the gods were fed — worshipped in basement churches and backyard shrines, invoked at kitchen tables and hospital beds. They were fat and strong and real.

Then the children grew up and stopped believing. The grandchildren didn’t even know the names. And the gods got thin.

Yevgeny — or whatever his actual name was, the Slavic syllables he occasionally let slip were nothing Rae could hold onto — explained this the way you’d explain plumbing. Matter-of-fact. Pipe A connects to pipe B. Belief flows in, divinity comes out. Cut the flow and the pressure drops. Enough time without worship and a god becomes a smudge, a feeling, a cold spot in a tunnel where the air tastes faintly of incense.

“And you’re still solid,” Rae said. “So someone still believes in you.”

“One old woman in Wicker Park,” Yevgeny said. “She lights a candle on the right days and says the right words and she does not even know why she does it. Her mother taught her. She thinks it is a habit, like brushing teeth. But it keeps me upright.” He looked at his hands, turned them over. “Barely.”

Rae should have walked away from this. The sane response to learning that your Tuesday regular was a dying Slavic deity was to pour yourself a shot of the good bourbon, lock up early, and never think about it again. She’d spent four years studying comparative religion at DePaul, and the most useful thing she’d learned was that people who go looking for the sacred tend to find more than they bargained for.

But she didn’t walk away. She was thirty-two and she could feel the years compacting behind her, the weight of identical shifts settling into her lower back and her flat affect and the small, hard knot of disillusionment she carried in her chest the way other people carried ambition. Something was happening. Something weird and impossible. And Rae Kowalski, who’d stopped believing in wonderful around the time her mother’s chemo stopped working, found that she wanted to see what came next.

What came next was the war.

There was, Yevgeny explained over the following weeks, a political situation. Rae had to suppress a laugh at this — the word “political” applied to gods in train tunnels had a quality of absurdity that Yevgeny, being a god, did not appreciate.

“Do not smirk,” he said. “People have died over this.”

“People or gods?”

“Both,” he said. “And the distinction is less meaningful than you imagine.”

The freight tunnels were divided into territories. The European gods held the north side — Slavic, Norse, Celtic remnants who’d been in Chicago longest and claimed the best spots when the system was new. The south side belonged to a coalition of African and Caribbean gods, some ancient, some syncretic, all scrappy. The west tunnels were contested, a no-man’s-land where Mexican and Central American gods were pushing in, still relatively strong because their communities were still relatively devout.

And underneath all of them, in the deepest and oldest parts of the tunnel system, in the flooded sections where the river water had turned everything to mud and rust, there was something else. Something that had been in Chicago before anyone came. Before the city, before the Potawatomi, before the glaciers retreated and left behind the flat prairie and the great cold lake. The tunnels went deeper than anyone had built them, and at the bottom there was a god that didn’t need believers because it had never been human enough to need belief.

“What does it want?” Rae asked.

“What does the lake want?” Yevgeny said. “What does the wind want? It is a force. It does not want. It simply is, and everything it touches becomes less.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“You are a bartender, not a theologian.”

“I have a degree in comparative religion.”

“This explains nothing about your career choices.”

The con was Bridget’s idea. Bridget, who manifested as a tall woman with red hair and freckled shoulders and a laugh that made the lights flicker, who drank Jameson and tipped in gold coins that turned to bottle caps by morning. Bridget, who was Irish the way Chicago is Irish — meaning she’d been there so long she’d become something else, something local and tough and profane.

“Here’s the thing, love,” Bridget said, leaning across the bar on a Tuesday night while sleet ticked against the windows. “The old ones on the north side are dying. We all are, but them faster than most. Veles — your Yevgeny — he’s got his one old woman, but Mokosh lost her last believer in August and she’s barely a whisper now. The Norns can’t agree on anything, which, to be fair, they never could. And the south side coalition is getting bolder.”

“What do they want?”

“Same thing everyone wants. More. More tunnel, more territory, more of whatever thin soup of belief is still sloshing around this city. There’s a fixed amount, see. That’s what the newcomers don’t understand. Every soul that lights a candle for Oshun is a soul that’s not remembering Mokosh. It’s a zero-sum game, and we are losing.”

“This sounds like it’s not my problem,” Rae said.

Bridget’s green eyes — really green, not hazel, the green of the fields in the stories, the ones you’re not supposed to visit — fixed on her with an intensity that made the air between them feel thick.

“It will be,” Bridget said. “Because we’ve got a plan, and we need a human to run it.”

The plan was elegant in the way that all cons are elegant before they go wrong. The European gods would stage a retreat from the contested western tunnels. The Mexican gods — Tlaloc’s people, Bridget called them, and Rae noted the careful disrespect — would push in, overextend. And in the chaos, Bridget’s people would make an offering to the thing at the bottom. Feed it. Give it something to chew on besides the foundations of the city.

“What’s the offering?” Rae asked.

“Belief,” Bridget said. “Concentrated. You take a human who knows we exist — really knows it, in their bones — and you walk them down to where the tunnels end and you let them be afraid. Fear is a kind of worship, did you know that? The oldest kind. Before anyone loved a god, they feared the dark. That fear feeds the deep thing, and while it’s feeding, we take back the western tunnels.”

“And the human?”

“Walks back out. Probably.”

“Probably.”

“Nothing’s certain, love. That’s theology for you.”

“And the human in this scenario is me.”

Bridget smiled. It was a beautiful smile, warm and conspiratorial, the kind of smile that made you feel like you were being let in on the best secret in the world. Rae had seen enough smiles across the bar to know this one was engineered. It was the smile of someone who needed something from you and had decided that charm was cheaper than force.

“You already believe,” Bridget said. “That’s the hard part. You’ve talked to Veles, you’ve seen our eyes go wrong, you’ve watched Esu fix a broken jukebox by spitting on it. You believe in us. All you have to do is walk downstairs and be scared.”

“What if I say no?”

“Then we find another bartender. But you’re the one who studied religion. You’re the one who wanted to know. This is what knowing costs.”

The tunnels were exactly as bad as Rae had imagined, which was the worst thing about them. She’d expected something mythic — cathedral ceilings, impossible geometries. Instead she got narrow brick corridors with standing water on the floor and the smell of rust and river and something older, something that smelled the way basements smell in houses where someone has died. The ceiling was low enough to duck in places, and the walls were slick with a moisture that felt organic, as if the tunnel itself were sweating.

Bridget walked ahead of her. Yevgeny walked behind. This arrangement, Rae noted, meant that she couldn’t run in either direction. She mentioned this observation aloud.

“You’re not a prisoner,” Yevgeny said.

“Then why are you blocking the exit?”

“I am a god of the underworld, Rae. I walk in tunnels. This is what I do. Not everything is about you.”

“That is almost certainly a lie,” she said, and heard Bridget laugh ahead of them in the dark, and the laugh echoed wrong, bouncing off surfaces that shouldn’t have been there, coming back changed.

They passed through territories. Rae could feel them shifting — warmth that smelled of peat and copper, Bridget’s country; a cold spot where the air tasted of pine resin, Yevgeny’s. They passed side tunnels where she heard voices in languages she almost recognized, the ghost-murmur of hymns in Lithuanian and Greek and Yoruba, fragments of worship so faded they were more rhythm than meaning. In one alcove she saw a figure sitting cross-legged against the wall, a small dark woman with white hair and eyes that reflected her phone’s flashlight like an animal’s. The woman was humming. The sound made Rae’s teeth ache.

“Don’t look at the Norns,” Bridget said without turning around. “They take it as an invitation to tell you things.”

“What kind of things?”

“The true kind. Nobody wants that.”

They went deeper. The tunnels widened, then narrowed, then opened into a chamber that Rae’s flashlight couldn’t find the edges of. The water on the floor was ankle-deep here, and warm, and it moved with a current that came from nowhere she could identify. The air was thick and tasted of limestone and something else — something pre-chemical, something that belonged to a world before anyone had bothered to name the elements.

“Here,” Bridget said. She had stopped walking, and when Rae moved the flashlight beam to her face, Bridget’s features were shifting. Not dramatically. More like the way a face changes when the light source moves — the bones underneath rearranging, the proportions of the skull asserting something older than the red-haired woman she’d been wearing upstairs. For a moment Bridget had too many teeth, and then she didn’t, and Rae couldn’t be sure she’d seen what she’d seen.

“I should not have come down here,” Rae said.

“No,” Yevgeny agreed from behind her. “But you did, and now we are here, and you need to understand something before the rest of this happens.”

“The rest of what?”

“Bridget lied to you. Not about everything. But about enough.”

Bridget turned around. Her eyes were still green, but it was the green of deep water now, the green of things growing in places where there is no light.

“I didn’t lie,” Bridget said. “I simplified.”

“You told her she was bait,” Yevgeny said. “She’s not bait. She’s the offering.”

The water around Rae’s ankles went cold. Not metaphorically cold, not the-chill-of-realization cold. Actually cold, like lake water in January, cold enough to hurt, and she could feel it pulling.

“The deep thing doesn’t eat fear,” Yevgeny said. His voice was steady and sad, the way voices get when someone has decided to tell a truth they’ve been sitting on for too long. “It eats knowing. A human who has seen us, who has looked at the face of divinity and understood what it was — that knowledge is the most concentrated form of belief there is. It’s pure. And when the deep thing consumes it, the person doesn’t die. They forget. Everything. They walk back out of the tunnel and they don’t remember gods or religion or that there is anything in the world that can’t be weighed and measured and explained.”

“And the deep thing gets full,” Bridget said, “and goes back to sleep, and we get twenty years, maybe thirty, before it’s hungry again and the whole process starts over. It’s not ideal. But it’s the system.”

“The system,” Rae said. Her voice sounded strange in the chamber, flat and echoless, as if the dark were eating the sound before it could bounce back. “You’re telling me the system is that every thirty years you feed a person to a hole in the ground and they lose their mind.”

“Not their mind,” Bridget said. “Just the part that knows about us. Just the sacred bit. They get to keep everything else.”

“Just the sacred bit,” Rae repeated.

“It’s a mercy,” Bridget said, and the worst thing was that she sounded like she meant it. “You’ve seen what knowing does to people. You studied it for four years and it got you nothing. Let it go. Walk down to the water and let the knowing go, and walk back out, and pour drinks and live your life and never worry about any of this again.”

Rae stood in the cold water and understood several things at once, the way you understand things in moments like this — not sequentially but all together, assembling in the space between one breath and the next.

She understood that Bridget was not wrong. She understood that knowing about gods had not improved her life. She understood that the woman with the DePaul degree and the dead mother and the nine years of other people’s drinks was not, in any measurable way, better off for having spoken to Yevgeny on that Thursday in November.

She also understood that Yevgeny had told her the truth, and that this was not an accident, and that he had done it because gods, even dying ones, are sometimes capable of something that looks like decency, which is not the same as goodness but is, on certain nights, close enough.

“What happens if I say no?” she asked. She’d asked this before, upstairs, in the warm bar with the sleet on the windows, and Bridget had given her an answer about finding another bartender. Down here the question meant something different.

“Then we go back up,” Yevgeny said. “And the deep thing stays hungry, and the tunnels get worse, and more of us fade, and eventually the balance tips and something bad happens to the city. An earthquake, maybe. A flood. Something the newspapers explain with geology but the old ones explain with hunger.”

“And the war?”

“Continues,” Bridget said. “It always continues. We’re gods, love. Fighting is what we do when we can’t do anything else.”

“You’re making this sound like my responsibility.”

“It’s not,” Yevgeny said. “That is the point I am trying to make, which Bridget would prefer I did not. It is not your responsibility. We are the ones who got thin. We are the ones who lost our believers. We are the ones waging war in tunnels over scraps of faith like dogs over bones. You owe us nothing.”

Bridget shot him a look that could have curdled milk. “You are the worst co-conspirator I have ever worked with, Veles. And I have worked with Loki.”

“I am not a co-conspirator. I am a god of the underworld having a crisis of conscience. These are different things.”

Rae stood in the dark water for a long time. She could feel the deep thing below her — not see it, not hear it, but feel it the way you feel the L train coming before you hear it, a vibration in the bones, a wrongness in the pressure of the air. It was old. It was hungry. It was not evil because it was not anything that understood the concept. It was a mouth in the earth, and it wanted to be fed.

She thought about her mother, who had believed in the Catholic God with a ferocity that frightened Rae as a child and comforted her as an adult and then, at the end, had become something else — not faith and not doubt but a third thing, a knowing that didn’t need either. Her mother had died in a room that smelled of antiseptic and lilies, and the priest had said the words, and Rae had stood in the doorway and felt nothing sacred at all. That absence had been the heaviest thing she’d ever carried.

She could let it go. That was what Bridget was offering. Not death but release. Walk into the water and let the knowing dissolve, and walk back out into a world where gods were stories and tunnels were tunnels and the only things behind a bar were bottles and glasses and the negotiable sorrows of other people.

She could keep it. That was what Yevgeny was offering, though he probably didn’t know it. Keep the knowing, keep the weight, tend bar on Tuesdays and Thursdays with the full understanding that the city was riddled with dying gods and she could do nothing except pour their drinks and accept their worthless coins and watch them fade.

Neither choice was good. This, Rae thought, was the most honest thing about the whole situation.

“I’m keeping it,” she said.

Bridget closed her eyes. “You’re a fool.”

“Probably. But it’s mine. The knowing is mine. You don’t get to take it just because it’s inconvenient for me.”

“The deep thing will stay hungry.”

“Then you’ll have to find another way to feed it. One that doesn’t involve stripping a person’s interior life out through their ankles.”

“There isn’t another way. We’ve been doing this for a hundred and fifty years.”

“Then maybe,” Rae said, “it’s time to try something that doesn’t involve a human sacrifice. I have a degree in comparative religion. I know how radical that concept is for gods.”

She turned around and walked past Yevgeny, who stepped aside, and she walked through the cold water and the warm water and the territories that smelled of peat and pine, past the Norn still humming in her alcove, through the brick corridors with their sweating walls, and up — up through the levels until she found a service door that opened onto a side street off Lake, and she walked out into the freezing Chicago night and breathed air that tasted of exhaust and snow and nothing sacred at all.

Her phone said it was 2:47 AM. She had a shift at noon.

She walked home along Wabash. The L rattled overhead, empty at this hour, its lights sliding along the tracks like something alive. The city was doing what Chicago always does at three in the morning — pretending to be asleep while remaining, in every way that mattered, completely and dangerously awake.

Below her feet, in the tunnels, the gods were probably already arguing about what to do next. Bridget would be furious. Yevgeny would be drinking. The deep thing would be hungry, and the war would go on because wars between gods always go on, that being the fundamental nature of the enterprise.

And Rae Kowalski would open the bar at noon and pour drinks and listen to the gods complain about each other, and she would know what they were, and the knowing would cost her something every day, and she would pay it, because it was hers, and because the alternative was forgetting, and forgetting was the one thing she was no longer willing to do.

Not for them. Not for anyone.

She let herself into her apartment, fed the cat, and set her alarm for eleven.