The Christopher Street subway station serves west Greenwich Village and New York University. To the south, it allows riders access to the World Trade Center, the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island ferry, and a transferride into Brooklyn. To the north, it’s a short hop to Times Square, Lincoln Center, Columbia University, and Grant’s Tomb.
The morning rush hour over, the crowd on the downtown platform built slowly. It consisted of a handful of tourists who were double-checking maps in guidebooks and a pair of slouching students wearing baggy clothes and blank expressions. A guitarist performed near the turnstiles, his instrument case open at his feet for donations. A businessman with a Walkman and a crisply foldedWall StreetJournal stood alone at the end of the platform.
Save for the guitarist’s unplugged sounds of Oingo Boingo, it was quiet on the platform. Then the first of the little brown bats flew in. It scratched a jagged course high over the tracks and snared the attention of one of the students.
“Hey, cool,” he droned. His sullen eyes opened slightly as he raised a pale finger and pointed.
The girl had her back to the tracks. She turned and looked as the bat zigzagged toward them. It landed on the boy’s black wool cap, and he suddenly came to life. He backed away, swinging his gangly arms at the creature as the talons pierced his scalp.
“Fuck, man!”
The girl stepped forward and swatted at the bat. The boy turned circles blindly as four more bats suddenly raced from the tunnel to the platform. Two of them descended on the girl from above and snatched at her long black-and-green hair while the other two dug at the back of a boy’s neck. She screamed in pain as the bats pulled her head back.
The tourists finally looked over, and the guitarist stopped playing. Shouting for help, they all ran toward the kids. The businessman standing one hundred feet away saw and heard nothing. His eyes were on his newspaper and his ears were full of opera.
Sitting in her bulletproof booth and counting out five-dollar bills, subway clerk Meg Ricci heard the cries of the people on the platform. She looked up over her reading glasses and saw the tourists and students dancing and flailing. She saw the musician swinging his guitar around him. Then she saw the flapping wings and the dark little bats attacking their faces and hands. She snatched up the phone and called for police assistance.
As Meg told the dispatcher what was going on, something else happened. A well-dressed man at the end of the platform had removed his earphones and looked over. As he turned toward the others, a large shadow enveloped him. It came over the man from above, like poured paint, and then spilled quickly to the left. When the inky blackness was gone, so was the man.
Meg reported exactly what she saw before she realized how insane it must sound. The dispatcher matter-of-factly asked her to repeat it. Meg did. That was what had happened.
A few seconds later the bats suddenly stopped attacking the people on the platform. They fluttered around for a moment, circling just under the ceiling like leaves in an eddy. Then they darted back over the tracks and took off down the tunnel, following the inky shape.
While the dispatcher put out a call, Meg broke the rules. Pulling a first aid kit from under the counter, she left her booth and hopped the turnstile. She turned back long enough to tell new arrivals not to come in, then went to help the riders who had fallen.
Two patrolmen from the sixth precinct arrived moments later. While one of them called for an ambulance from St. Vincent’s and kept other people from entering the station, the second officer went to help Meg.
She was extremely calm as she applied disinfectant and bandages to the students’ scratches and told the officer about the bats and about the well-dressed man who must have fallen from the platform. What she saw, she decided, had been his jacket flying up. Or maybe it was the reflection of her own dark hair on the glass of the booth.
The officer went to the end of the platform to have a look. He hopped down onto the tracks. When he came back he was holding headphones from a Walkman. The foam ends were wet with blood.
He called for backup from the transit police and recommended that the station be closed.
Still calm, Meg went back to her booth and called her supervisor for instructions. He told her to lock the money drawer and the booth and to do whatever the police told her.
Transit police arrived. They took Meg’s name, address, and phone number, and told her she could go.
She took the next bus back to Queens.