It is mid September in New York, 1779, and as leaves gently drift
off trees in the bright moonlight, we follow a slow pan of the City as either an antique
map or a matte shot takes us to the dilapidated gates of the Marlowe Sanitarium for the
Spiritually Overwhelmed with cries and screams coming from behind its crumbling walls.
Moving through a barred window inside we witness a crude operating theater and a writhing
madman being held down by burly orderlies. The soft flickering of candlelight cannot
disguise that his chest has been opened up and the powerful, towering figure of Hodiah
Marlowe, would-be savior of the insane and owner of the madhouse, holds the patient's
spleen in one hand and a large jar containing an amber fluid in the other, watched on by
the horrified faces of a number of respectable City elders in their ring-side seats.
In his low rumble, Marlowe states "I have found that this
organ, the spleen, in a diseased state is a cause of imbalance in the humors of the
insane" at which point he plunges it into the brown elixir, a concoction of his own
invention that, we learn, is supposed to redress the balance of the humors in the
patient's body. Marlowe attempts to reconnect the spleen but, unsurprisingly, the
reluctant patient dies in agony and the elders leave in disgust, withdrawing their
financial and moral support for his cruel experiments as they are wailed at by the doomed
inmates of this charnel house.
Following the body of the patient to the depths of the building, we
see it thrown down into a rotting pile of previous attempts on the shore of an ancient
underground river running below the building, while in his study Marlowe rails at the
elders and his own failures. As they claimed he was the greatest lunatic in this asylum,
he madly reasons that he should take his own medicine and overdoses on his elixir,
collapsing. Moving out of the window, down the underground river over the rotting corpses
and up to the full moon, we pause a few seconds on the shining silver disc until the roar
of a helicopter flying straight across it towards us punctures our peace and sets us
firmly in nineteen ninety seven as we pull out to reveal evening in modern day Manhattan.
Moving down to street level, we follow the towering, menacing figure
of a long coated and determined looking man. Clutching a very large briefcase, he makes
his way down into the Subway closely monitored by a number of plain clothes detectives who
talk to each other via headset mics, coordinated by the mid-forties, crew cut and stony
faced Detective Thomas M. Allison. As the man and the following officers descend into the
Subway station we learn that the psychotic and dangerous Brad Tyler is the leader of a
right-wing militia group and intends to explode the enormous briefcase bomb he is carrying
under the Statue of Liberty and destroy it. We also learn that he was also directly
responsible for the death of three of Detective Allison's colleagues some months before
when they foiled his last attempt at a terrorist act - Tom Allison is taking this very
personally and very seriously. He wants Tyler - badly.
As the train pulls into the station, we meet the driver Mitch Norton
and see not only the police slowly moving in on Tyler but a young man and his mother
patiently waiting to get on the train - the sixteen year old James Turrell and late
thirties Alice. Some tense minutes pass on board the first carriage, until Tyler realizes
he has been surrounded. Grabbing James, he produces a huge handgun and trains it on the
civilians and police on the train while he firmly holds James to him with the briefcase
bomb, which he threatens to detonate. Detective Allison tries to reason with him but Tyler
is having none of it -Allison takes a shot which passes through the shoulder of the
terrorist and hits Mitch Norton, who slumps at his controls. While Tyler fights wildly,
killing civilians and Police alike, the carriage speeds into a corner, derails and goes
through a wall. Tyler is hurled towards the cab, as is his bomb, and the first carriage
becomes detached and hangs over an unseen drop as the surviving police officers, Jamie and
Alice crawl precariously to safety out of the back of the train. Rubble starts to fall and
the deceased passengers and police begin to slide to the front, tipping it forward. Mitch
Norton comes around and stares in disbelief at what he sees below as the train lights
flicker on and off - with just enough energy he gets out of his cab and drops to a low
ledge where eerie gasping sounds are heard. Again unseen by us, he witnesses an ancient
pile of corpses below him and, terrified, he frenziedly crawls under his dangerously
teetering cab which flips over and plunges downwards as the rest of the wall through which
it came collapses, sealing it off.
As rescue workers arrive, Jamie and his mother are comforted by Tom
Allison while Mitch, in a profound state of horror and shock, is stretchered away
screaming something like "bodies... bodies..". The rescue teams refuse to
attempt to salvage the carriage - by Allison's own admission there are only dead people on
it and the massive cost of retrieving it after the cave-in would be pointless. Allison is
furious, as he is not convinced that Tyler is dead but he is told in no uncertain terms
back at his precinct that the case is now closed - he got his man and saved the day. Even
Tyler couldn't survive burial under a thousand tons of rock.
Days pass, and we follow the close relationship between single
mother Alice and Jamie as they settle into their new life in the City. They had only been
there a few days when the Subway incident occurred and she was trying to get into the
rhythm of her new job as a legal secretary while Jamie, an extremely intelligent but
sincere young man, settled into his new school. Things had been tough since the death of
his father but New York promised a new life for them both. However, the trauma of the
events has a profound effect on James and he begins his obsession with the Underground,
wanting to know so much more about why a train could disappear and never be recovered. As
James reads and researches, we learn facts about the Subway, its history and construction
(based on fact) that make his interest understandable - its origins in the 1880's, the
amazing underground river systems, the Malbone Street tragedy in 1918...
His mother thinks it an unhealthy fascination as he puts more of his
spare time into studying it and following his passion of mechanical engineering, but a
friend of Alice's thinks it is just his way of working things out. What Alice does not
know about is Jamie's dreams... of darkness, suffocation and noises from below ground, the
same noises as heard by Mitch when he fell out of his cab in the crash - but louder...
closer.
Continuing his research, Jamie goes to the reading room of the New
York Library and as he goes for a book on the early history of New York River Systems,
another hand reaches for it - Detective Allison and Jamie come face to face once again,
and uncomfortably discuss why they are there. It becomes obvious that they both have a
driving fascination for the secrets of the Subway, although the roots of their obsessions
are completely different. Allison tells him to forget his research - 'If you're that
interested, become a motorman'. He doesn't want this bright and able kid getting in the
way of his attempts to retrieve the body of the terrorist Tyler - and that briefcase bomb.
Late September, and the trees are nearly bare. A male/female rail
inspection team stroll down a disused part of track deep beneath the surface of New York,
casually chatting on their routine patrol. A noise is heard in the distance, a sighing
fluid sound. Hardly bothered by it, they shine their torches in its direction and decide
to have a look. The man, Moyes, goes ahead and finds a freshly broken rusted inspection
plate - moving in, a form flashes past and he jumps despite himself. It is a large rat.
Annoyed, he takes a swing at it - and is suddenly lifted off his feet and torn into two.
The woman hears the gargled scream and rushes over, seeing his body in pieces and his
mouth still moving in horror. Terrified, she turns - and her flashlight illuminates
something moving swiftly before her falling torch shows her viscera slap against the
tunnel walls.
Cutting to a close-up of a headline proclaiming "Subway
Inspectors feared dead", Tom Allison goes over to a map of the Subway on the wall and
notices it is very close to the crash site. He has an overriding, irrational concern that
Tyler somehow survived the crash and has killed the two inspectors. His theory gets little
hearing from both his superiors and friends - besides, it is out of his jurisdiction
anyway - give the Transit Police the problem. Deeply troubled, Allison has a terrible
feeling about the disappearances as he watches leaves drop from the trees outside the
station.
Cutting to the Turrell household, Alice is giving Jamie a hard time
about riding the Subway all times of the day - this obsession of his is not only taking
over his life, it is getting dangerous. Waving the same newspaper report about the two
rail inspectors, she tells him that they supposedly knew what they were doing - and they
have disappeared. A furious exchange occurs between them - frustrations about moving to
the City, of the death of his father, of everything but the truth about him becoming
obsessed come pouring out and he rushes out of the apartment, making his inevitable way to
the nearest Subway. However, he pauses when he sees four tough gang members at the
entrance - perhaps he should heed his mother. The Subway is a dangerous place. From their
sneering point of view we see him turn and go, then follow them as they run down the now
deserted station with cans of spray paint. Running over the barriers they make their way
to the platforms and begin their nightly redecoration.
As their ghetto blaster pumps out music to work by, we take the POV
of Marlowe as he furtively moves in the shadows down on the track, creating a crackling of
the live rail unheard by the gang. From the track, arcing electricity suddenly shoots
spectacularly from the gloom and blows out the main lights on the platform. Plunged into
semi-darkness the gang members' confusion can be seen again from the POV of Marlowe who
moves with incredible speed to the first gang member, whose head is torn off. The second
and third fire wildly with handguns towards us and are dismembered swiftly - the fourth
one runs back up the escalator and thinks he has made it to the safety of the light, only
to be brutally ragged face down to the bottom of the escalator... and torn open with a
gurgling scream that echoes up the deserted tunnels and walkways.
Cutting to the platform some hours later, Detective Allison stands
and admires the huge swathes of blood and gore dripping from the platform walls. With
gritted jaw he comments 'Now that's what I call graffiti'. As Transit Police with mops try
to clean up the place, we learn that they have found preliminary evidence of at least
three victims, possibly four - but most of their bodies are missing. The blood trail
disappears into the darkness of the tunnel...
In the days that follow, James watches the newspaper and television
coverage of Allison's huge manhunt for Tyler, who he firmly believes to be the twisted
perpetrator of these crimes. Dozens of uniformed officers ride the Subways to restore
confidence in the system and, with the first cold winter weather, the killings stop - as
do Jamie's dreams of the creature underground. With James suddenly losing the interest he
once had in the Subway and Allison feeling as if his efforts have driven Tyler away, the
passing of the year is shown in a montage of various cityscapes showing a snowy winter,
the coming of spring and the ending of summer. James is seen doing well in school, his
mother works hard in her new job - and all seems to be finally back to normal...But then,
on the exact anniversary of the subway disaster, James wakes up in terror - his nightmare
has returned, and this time we join in his dreaming as he floats over and through the
city, coming to a clearing where the wounded Mitch Norton crouches with his ear to the
ground near a large metal grille - as he beckons Jamie to join him in listening to the
scratching sounds from below, the grille suddenly bursts upwards and a huge unseen
ethereal form looms over the terrified James, snatches Mitch and drags him screaming down
with him to the depths below. His obsession rekindled even brighter than before, James
instinctively knows that something dreadful is about to happen. Again.
With Alice having left for work, Jamie rushes out of bed and rings
Detective Allison - he is convinced the killings are going to start again but Allison,
against his real gut reaction, says that his plan worked last year and the killings have
stopped. He cuts the seventeen year old short when he points out they never caught the
killer - he doesn't need this from a kid. Ringing off, James pursues his mother's route
into the rush hour - he gets to her place of work and she is not there. Panic stricken, he
goes back into the Subway and steals his way to a disused part of a station (there are
many disused stations and platforms on the IRT and BMT that can be used as a factual basis
for many of the locations) and his haste is suddenly taken over by caution as he realizes
he is now far away from the outside world.
Hearing what he thinks is his mother's voice, James moves deeper
into the tunnels. He quickly finds that his knowledge of the Subway is not as broad as he
thought as he comes across fast running streams, walls that should not be there and
junctions that no map ever showed. Deeper and deeper he moves, with only occasional
maintenance bulkheads dimly lighting his way. In near darkness, he stumbles over an object
and looking down, he sees a bag - picking it up, he identifies it as his mother's and
finds her bracelet hanging bloodily off it. Terrified but pumped up with adrenaline, he
hears her voice once again and turns a corner - to see a patch of darkness that stands out
from the gloom, a moving outline that is busy around a limp form. The figure looks up and
glowing slits regard James coolly - James realizes with horror that the body is his
mother's and he screams 'No!' at the form, which straightens up and begins to advance upon
him.. Mortified, James turns and runs blindly - a short but frantic chase ensues that ends
when James sees the light of an active station in the distance. Marlowe is gaining on him,
issuing a liquid fluid laughter as he gets closer to his prey. Running for all his might
James makes it out onto the track - and horrified onlookers see him electrocuted before
their very eyes as he stumbles onto the live rail. All goes dark.
From James' point of view, an image of a hospital room swims into
focus - and Detective Allison stands regarding the badly hurt young man. In his hand is
Alice's bracelet - which he throws onto the bed. He very much wants to talk to him about
the disappearance of his mother but James weakly corrects him - she has not disappeared.
She has been killed. Allison angrily asks how he knows this and why he was down there - he
tells the Detective that there is some huge form down there, killing and hunting. The size
of it leads Allison to believe that Tyler is, incredibly, still alive but James is not
convinced it is human. With a sneer, Allison tells him that Tyler never was - and to date,
since the young man has been recovering in hospital, there have been forty three
disappearances on the Subway in the last four weeks. It has been shut down, public
confidence has collapsed and the city is in crisis. Detective Allison would very much like
to know who is down there doing this. To that end, the Military have been called in and we
see Allison involved in a huge operation - with the system deserted, the tunnels are
flooded with gas and heavily armed police and soldiers go down wearing gas masks. We see
teams of men and women systematically stalking the tunnels and searching every part of the
Subway - Allison leads a team to the place where James was electrocuted and the tension
builds as the search continues.
Then, all hell breaks loose as Marlowe goes on a feeding frenzy -
flashlights dim and his swift form cuts a swathe through wildly firing troops and police
alike. Some officers plunge through walls and drown in underground rivers, some shoot each
other in the confusion and throughout, Marlowe attacks with bloody vigor, moving from
group to group and spreading confusion.
With shouts and screams echoing through the tunnels and radios often
not able to function, Allison comes across the original crash site of the carriage - and
searches for Tyler, calling out his name and challenging him. With intermittent radio
contact, Allison goes around a corner of a partially collapsed access tunnel with stones
falling from the ceiling around him. There he spies the huge slumped form of Tyler -
excitedly Allison calls into his radio that the gas got Tyler... it was him all the time!
Repeating it, his comrades begin to move to his location as Allison gets close up to the
body of Tyler. Moving his head with one hand to examine him, Allison is horrified to find
the rotting features stare socket-eyed towards him. Realizing someone or something else is
to blame, he desperately tries to call in that it is not Tyler - but the partially seen
figure of Marlowe looms out of the shadows and decapitates Allison with one blow and
brings down the ceiling of the tunnel above them, stopping Allison's team from getting to
the bodies. The whole area starts to collapse and the team only just make it out alive.
Their sensational report, that Detective Allison not only discovered
the deranged killer but sacrificed his life to stop him, amazes New York and the deaths
stop short of last year's coming of winter. But James knows better - with the victims
already claimed in addition to the twenty four officers and soldiers unaccounted for,
presumed buried by the evil Tyler, James knows the creature has had enough to eat - for
that is its purpose. In Autumn, in The Fall, he awakes and feeds. Then he sleeps...
As James recovers from his injuries, he realizes what he must do -
go down and face his obsession, come to terms with his darkness and destroy what lives
below. With his strength returning, he applies himself to various pursuits - physical
agility and strength in the gym, hours of reading and researching the Subway and the
building up of a multi layered map which he painstakingly transfers onto a palmtop
computer.
As the weeks turn into months, winter comes and goes while he
develops a sophisticated protective suit which uses all of his mechanical engineering
skills. It is designed to insulate against electrocution, enable him to travel under water
and has an exoskeletal frame that can withstand falling debris and generally enhances his
own strength. He equips it with powerful battery powered lights and a deadly pneumatic arm
unit that fires home-made phosphor projectiles. Testing it through the spring, James
Turrell is now a changed man - nineteen years old, physically at his peak - but grimly
determined to confront the creature, face up to his inner demon - and destroy it.
When the anniversary of the crash, or as he now regards it the
awakening of the creature comes, he sits ready in front of a police radio, television set
and his huge plans of the Subway - and waits. It is only hours before Marlowe strikes - at
first the police attribute the deaths to sick copycat killings but James knows different
as he carefully plots first one, then three, then seven disappearances and discoveries of
body parts. With New York once again in the grip of horrified disbelief, the Subway is
once again threatened with closure and James, resplendent in his home-made suit, descends
into the Subway through an old access tunnel he discovered in his research.
We follow the determined young man as he traverses secret tunnels,
plunges into icy underground rivers and follows his computerized map. He has a very good
idea of where to look but getting there is the problem. Passages not touched for seventy
years echo to his steps as he discovers a partially collapsed access tunnel and then
submerges under a flooded section, to reappear in a dark, narrow tunnel which has faintly
flickering light at the end of it. Turning off his own, he cautiously approaches the end
of it and turns to see a line of flickering partially decomposed heads, a gory line of
human fat fueled lamps. Nearly sick with the stench, he nevertheless forces himself on -
and into an opening that reveals a view nothing could have ever prepared him for.
In a cavernous expanse, a river runs through an ancient channel,
around which are set more burning lamps illuminating piled high rotting bodies. In the
center sits the Subway carriage, smashed and crushed, full of stripped bodies. Around this
are built various structures made of bone and the whole scene could be described as a
'bone cathedral', with skeletons full and part propped up into standing positions with
poles and wooden stakes all around. As James stands in horror and awe, an object rolls
towards his feet. He looks down to see the decayed head of his mother and a low, gurgling
voice asks 'Seek ye this?' At last the full form of Marlowe reveals itself from the
flickering shadows and we see his putrefying mess of a body, his skin alive with creatures
feeding off his living dead tissue. The eyes glow evilly and the hands gesture with bony
talons as he moves towards the frozen boy, regarding him with some amusement. From his
discourse, we not only learn that he understands the nature of James' obsession, but was
once like him - driven, determined but misunderstood. Returning to 1779, we pick up in
flashback how his comatose form was discovered after a terrible disease swept old New
York, caused by the piles of bodies he dumped into the underground river system. Dragged
through the streets as a madman, he was spared the noose and was instead thrown into a
large well full of plague bodies that would then be sealed up. As corpses piled above him
and crushed him, he drank down the full vial of elixir he had created to cure madness -and
darkness took him. But then blinding light and a deafening noise awoke him - the carriage
crash brought his distorted, metamorphosed form back to life and an insatiable hunger
overtook him. The darkness would overtake him soon and once again he would have to sleep,
but Autumn was his time for living. And the Subway was his kingdom.
James stands and regards the creature, finally understanding that
the fruits of his obsession stand before him. If this is what his life has lead him to,
then it is time to alter the course. With an enraged cry, he fires off three of his ten
incendiaries - the counter on the unit of his arm clocks down to seven as the flaming
projectiles tear through the writhing body of Marlowe, who laughs chillingly. Realizing he
wants to live, to get away from this darkness, James runs and a climactic chase ensues.
James runs and uses his suit to its fullest powers and, seemingly out of harm, he stumbles
down an old tunnel and all is quiet until Marlowe bursts through its wall, showering
debris all over. With the pursuit on again James heads towards the live area of the track.
In a very narrow passage, the tell-tale rumbling of an approaching train seems to spell
out certain disaster - James punches and kicks his way through a weak part of the wall and
in a spectacular leap to safety through the hole he makes, only just manages to avoid
being hit by a speeding train.
Still in the live area of the Subway, James hears the mocking
laughter of Marlowe, who looms up towards him. Thinking he can destroy Marlowe if he can
get him to step on the live rail, James backs away slowly. Marlowe finds this amusing and
deliberately stands on it as electricity spectacularly courses and arcs through and from
him, showing his form to be full of gaps and holes in a blue white lightning display.
James is hit by a directed bolt and hurled down an access shaft. Plunging to the bottom of
it, he lands on his gun arm and breaks his wrist, making aiming and firing very difficult.
Staggering to his feet he finds his computer has been smashed so, working blind now, he
tries to make it to a nearby underground stream and swim to safety. Thinking he is safe,
he swims with some relief but is suddenly dragged under by Marlowe and he blacks out. The
creature drags his limp frame effortlessly back into the bone cathedral and props him up
on a pile of bodies, directly opposite the rail carriage wreck.
Marlowe towers above him, gloating in his victory. James, badly
battered and bleeding, comes around and wildly fires three shots at point blank into his
chest. The only effect they have is to annoy Marlowe who picks James up and hurls him
first across the cathedral into a pile of splintering bones, and then back over to a row
of lamps. One of the burning heads belongs to Allison, and James realizes he has no chance
of survival. Picking him up like a rag doll, Marlowe tosses him into the coach, crushing
the life out of him. With his counter down to six, James shakily pulls his pneumatic gun
arm up to his head in order to kill himself but Marlowe is upon him in a split second,
knocking his arm away and breaking it. Picking him up he throws him to the other end of
the carriage - James' head splits open and blood streams into his eyes. His interest gone
in the game, Marlowe decides it is time to finish James and begins to advance upon him.
With his good arm, James scrabbles himself backwards and he touches
upon something next to him. Dizzily looking down, he sees the terrorist Tyler's suitcase
bomb, the one with which he was held by those two years ago. With Marlowe ever closer
James summons all of his strength and throws the case at Marlowe, who catches it easily.
Dragging up his useless gun arm, James fires off two rounds which hurtle past Marlowe.
With two left, Marlowe angrily moves in for the kill. James, close to death, fires again
and it tears through his head, knocking him back. Furious now Marlowe picks up the case
ready to smash his head in with a bellow - but freezes. James is looking up at him,
covered in blood and gasping his last, but he is smiling, no - laughing! Puzzled, Marlowe
pauses and as James' features twist into a look of vengeance and victory, he fires his
very last shot straight into the case. The resulting explosion vaporizes the astonished
looking Marlowe, the carriage and the whole bone cathedral which is buried under a massive
rock fall. As the dust settles, leaves float down shafts of sunlight from the huge hole
that has appeared above.
It is a lovely Autumn day.
