“Red, don’t be rude!” Goldilocks reprimanded her.
“It’s all right—I get that all the time,” Rusty said. “Homelessness is a recent chapter for me. I used to live in Brooklyn and worked as a janitor at the Belvedere Castle in Central Park. A couple of months ago I was fired and lost everything.”
“Why were you fired?” Jack asked.
“Well, to put it bluntly, I saw something magical and it changed my life forever.”
“Was it Hamilton?” Red asked. “I keep seeing signs about him posted all over the city. If he’s anything like Shakeyfruit’s Hamhead I hope we get a chance to meet him.”
The others rolled their eyes and ignored her.
“Earlier, when you told us about the library, you mentioned it wasn’t the first time you’d seen magic in the city,” Bree said. “I didn’t think you were being serious, but now I’m really interested to hear about it.”
Rusty let out a deep sigh before telling them. Clearly, it was a difficult subject for him to talk about.
“It happened a few months ago when I used to work night shifts at Belvedere Castle,” he said. “I was in the middle of cleaning the joint when this strange vibration suddenly came out of nowhere. I figured it was just an earthquake and went back to work, but when I got home, none of the morning news stations were reporting an earthquake. I was convinced I had just imagined it, but then a few weeks later, the vibration happened again. The second time was much stronger and lasted longer than the first. I called the police to report an active fault line, but they assured me it was just a subway running underneath the castle. However, when I got home and looked at a map, I saw there aren’t any subway lines that run below that part of Central Park. The rumbling didn’t happen again until a few weeks later. The third time rattled the castle so hard, it shattered windows and left cracks all over the floor. I was nearly knocked off the balcony I was cleaning. I remember it didn’t feel anything like an earthquake or a train, but like something enormous was hatching from an invisible egg. I looked up and that’s when I saw it.”
“Saw what?” Conner asked.
“The best way I can describe it is a window into another world,” Rusty said. “For a brief second I saw a huge forest of evergreen trees and a bright starry sky. It looked like something out of a storybook—couldn’t have been more different from the hustle of New York City. Then the window disappeared as fast as it had appeared.”
Conner and Bree exchanged a grave look. Without any solid proof, they knew exactly what Rusty had witnessed—the bridge between worlds was starting to form.
“I went to the police station and filed a report about what I saw, but none of the officers believed me. A copy of the report was sent to the castle’s property manager and they fired me. They thought I had caused all the damages myself and was making up a ridiculous story to cover it up. Word about my police report spread all over town, and no one wanted to hire me after that.”
“That’s terrible!” Bree said. “Did the window ever appear again?”
“I didn’t see it again, but others have seen it appear all over the city,” Rusty said.
“But who? And where?” Conner asked.
“You can ask them yourself,” Rusty said. “Follow me.”
They continued down the Calvin Coolidge Express line. Flickering lights came into view ahead, and soon they discovered a vast underground campsite that was home to dozens and dozens of homeless people. The tunnel was full of tents, sleeping bags, and furniture made from cardboard and newspapers. The homeless people were spread out through the camp in groups; some kept warm standing over blazing trash cans, some played musical instruments, and some watched a man teaching a family of rats to fetch.
Rusty escorted Conner and his friends to a group who sat in the corner of the camp. The group included an older man in a blue suit, a woman in a fur coat, another woman in a Yankees baseball hat, and a third woman wearing a T-shirt that said READ BANNED BOOKS and tinfoil wrapped around her head. They were gathered around a radio listening to a patchy broadcast.
“There you are, Bagasarian!” the man said. “We heard there was an evacuation in Midtown. We were worried you got swept away.”
“Conner and company, allow me to introduce you to my underground family,” Rusty said. “This is Jerry Oswald, Annette Crabtree, Judy Harlow, and Roxie Goldberg.”
“I hope you aren’t from the papers!” Judy said, and hid her face behind the collar of her fur coat. “If I get included in another one of those savage Where Are They Now editorials, I’ll just die!”
“For the hundredth time, Judy, you aren’t famous!” Annette said.
“How dare you!” Judy said. “I was on Broadway!”
“It was Off-Broadway, and it was in the eighties,” Roxie reminded her. “No one’s looking for you now.”
“They’re not reporters, they’re just trying to get inside the public library,” Rusty explained. “But since we’re passing through, they want to hear your stories about seeing you know what.”
Rusty’s friends were as mortified as if he had just disclosed a nasty secret. They looked around the tunnel to make sure no one else had heard him.
“Why do you always have to bring that up?” Jerry asked.
“They’ll only mock us like the rest of the world,” Judy said.
“Haven’t we been through enough already?” Annette asked.
Rusty’s friends got to their feet and tried to walk away, but Conner and Bree blocked them from going too far.
“We’re not here to insult you,” Conner said. “We just want to know what you saw and where you saw it. Please, it might help us answer a lot of questions.”
“And it’s not like you have anything to lose,” Red added.
Despite the rude comment from his friend, the homeless people sensed the sincerity in Conner’s voice. They looked at one another and shrugged.