Chicago: the White City
You’ve heard of the Chicago Slashers, right? No, not the old XFL
team; the things that crawl out of the sewers once every couple of years and go
to town like it was a smorgasbord. It’s a pain in the ass tracking those things
down, but it goes to show you that you should always be careful where you lay
your pipe.
The stuff started over a hundred years ago because of the Chicago
Stock Yards. I bet you they were the biggest yards in the world. In the
eighteen-seventies most meatpacking plant used a real half-assed system of
brick pipes to dump all the blood runoff from the factory into the sewer, where
it’d go straight into the Illinois and Michigan Canal. The sewers under all the
slaughterhouses in the stockyards had really big catch basins installed in them,
the idea being to keep bone and meat from going into the sewer to feed rats,
which might carry the plague. Thing is nobody ever complained about meat and
bone getting dumped in the sewer, they only complained about the blood-so
nobody ever checked these things. I mean, who would? If these things did their
job right, they’d be full up with a thousand or so gallons of rotting meat and
maggots.
Now, if you’re the kind of guy who’s predisposed to walking
around in the sewers, and you’ve got nowhere else to go, these things could get
pretty attractive. First, not half of them worked right so most of them were
empty and you could fix them up to stay that way easy-like. Second, they were
pitch black twenty-four seven. Third, they put you right next to a never ending
river of fresh animal blood. You can guess what happened next, a bunch of
crooked scum-sucker vampires set up in the catch basins down there like a
family of raccoons. We didn’t even know they were there for about thirty years,
though, they were that quiet.
Come the turn of the century the city had built the new Drainage
Canal. That’s the one that reversed the flow of the river, and cleaned up all
the drinking water. This changed some of the rules on waste dumping, and the
stockyard plants had to build new tunnels to send the blood into the new canal.
All of a sudden the blood the squatters lived on dried up, and they started
having to go above-ground to eat. Living in brick hole and drinking out of
buckets wasn’t any kind of good practice, so most of these pricks would just
clock someone and pull them into the sewer. If it had been an expo year, nobody
would’ve noticed. The disappearance started getting noticed in the Tribune, and
someone figured it out and went down into the old tunnels under the stock yard
and dynamited them all to hell. The old tunnels were obsolete because of the
Canal, so nobody bothered to try and dig them out, and the disappearances
stopped.
Since then, like I said, maybe every ten years you get a slasher-killer in town. Like in ’46 when that six-year old Suzanne Degnan was found hacked up in sewer? The CPD beat a confession out of William Heirens, but later on admitted he didn’t do it, and it wasn’t any coincidence that the body was in a sewer. Or in ’56, when those two Grimes girls get grabbed coming out of an Elvis movie, and their bodies washed out of a floodwater run-off tunnel? Well, that tunnel ran straight into the city, and pretty near the old stockyards. So I’m just saying-if you get some disappearances, and bodies start turning up near the waterworks, you know where to start looking.