The Beach Tunnel is New York’s first subway, a forgotten pneumatic tube under Manhattan leading through time to 1870.
| Type | Place |
| Spanish entry | El túnel de Beach (Never 9-11) |
Description
The tube, 95 meters (312 feet) long and three across, was dug in the late 19th century as an experiment moving a car by compressed air, also an amusement ride. The city grew over and forgot it. Damp, by the river, it bears graffiti: Frodo lives, Three lions, and one seen only as an afterimage: travel through time.
Its 95 meters are time, perhaps over 95 years. A damp crack in the ruined basement by the elevator shaft under the tower of Mars Inc., which brought the drug, leads there.
Properties
It tries to send entrants back to their era; paid one’s own mass, it fires a capsule upward like a bullet. An old brick, read psychically, showed something entered a week earlier and something left hours earlier: the ambrosia’s route into the past. Guardian of Time Adrian Eldritch deduced where and when it was encapsulated. It ended in the Lethal Chamber and became the Black Stone of Ambrosia.
The guardian
At the far end the ghostly tricorned lighthouse keeper and gravedigger Jack o’ Lantern raises a lantern: Follow me… and abandon all hope, to “your tombs, which were once wombs”. He thinks they should not have lived past the worm moon. It is a trap: Jack of the Knives and seven shadows skewer the unwary with shadow daggers. Crossing with their fallen, one seeker read in his mind: nothing fears death more than time.