The Night Tourist by Katherine Marsh Page A

studied it. “Hey, isn’t this the map that fellow used years ago?” she said, sliding it across the table to Harry.
    Harry pulled the map closer to his stubbly face.
    “What fellow?” asked Jack.
    “The one who broke in. The living one,” Ruby said.
    “Yeah,” mumbled Harry. “It is.”

XIX | Trapped
    For a second Jack thought that they were talking about him. But then he remembered that Ruby had said that the man had come in years ago. “Tell me more,” he begged.
    Even Euri had stopped brooding over the circle business. “Yeah, what happened?” she asked.
    Ruby bent forward and whispered, “A living fellow came into the underworld. He wanted to take away some woman. Said they were in love.”
    Jack stared at his mother’s name written in the corner of the map. Had his father come to the underworld like Orpheus, and tried to bring his mother back? Is that why she had an asterisk next to her name? “Was he a professor? A big man with a beard?”
    Harry cut in. “We never saw him. But I thought he was some sort of teacher or something.”
    Euri grabbed Harry’s arm. “What happened to her?” she asked. “Did it work?”
    “He went back up. I’m not sure what happened to her.”
    Jack had a powerful feeling that the man had been his father, but there was one way to find out for sure. “Was it eight years ago? Was that when he came?”
    Harry nodded.
    Jack squeezed Euri’s hand under the table.
    But a voice interjected. “No, it was definitely further back than that.” They both turned to Ruby.
    “What do you mean?” Jack said. “It had to be eight years ago!”
    She shook her head. “It happened sixteen years ago.”
    Harry cocked his head and made calculations on his hands. “She’s probably right,” he finally said. “I got a bad head for dates.”
    “Are you sure?” Jack asked. His mother had been alive sixteen years ago, so there would have been no reason for his father to go to the underworld to find her. The man must have been someone else. He couldn’t believe he was wrong. He folded up the map and put it in his pocket.
    “It was definitely sixteen years ago,” repeated Ruby. “It happened the same year that the fellow who murdered me finally died.” Her eyebrows arched slightly and her black eyes flickered at Jack. “You know there’s something funny about you. It’s almost like you’re alive....”
    “He just died,” Euri interjected. “He’s new.”
    But Ruby ignored her. “If I didn’t know better, I might think you followed that map down here yourself. It’s funny he has the map, isn’t it, Harry?” She gave a laugh that made the hair on the back of Jack’s neck prickle.
    Suddenly, the two old labs in front of the fireplace staggered to their feet and began to bark and then whine. “Quiet!” shouted the bartender. The horse-size three-headed dog barreled into the bar in a tracking posture, dragging one of the thick-necked guards after him, and sniffed at a short, heavyset ghost, who dropped his drink in terror.
    “Stay calm. We’ll just go through the wall,” Euri whispered. She turned to Ruby and Harry. “So long, we’ve got to run.”
    Standing next to Cerberus and his handler was the uniformed guard from the photograph, with the bushy mustache and nightstick. “Stay where you are,” he shouted in the cold, commanding voice that Jack remembered from when he was wedged into the tunnel. “We have the walls surrounded.”
    “What are we going to do now?” Jack whispered to Euri.
    Euri looked frantically around the bar. “I don’t know.”
    “Jeepers, creepers, it’s Clubber Williams,” said Ruby.
    Jack remembered Professor Schmitt’s warning. “Who exactly is Clubber Williams?”
    Ruby looked at Jack as if he were crazy. “Who’s Clubber Williams? He was only the most corrupt cop in the city’s history. He averaged a fight a day in Hell’s Kitchen, then made hundreds of thousands of dollars terrorizing the Tenderloin.” She pointed to