"HA!!!" sneered the diminutive figure from the shadows of the shuttered bar down from the corner of State Fair, off of Woodward Avenue, one of Detroit’s famous main drags.

"Eeevil knows about them!" he mewled, mimicking a sniveling, terrified child. A rat in the corner pissed itself and ran. The figure whipped the graphic novel he had been reading at the rat to encourage its hasty departure. He sidled across the bar itself, looking like a slightly bowlegged and drunk circus figure atop the well-worn polished wood surface, to draw himself a pint of Purple Gang Pilsner from the tap.

"Those guys were bastards. Shoulda killed the rest of ’em while I had the chance". He took a swig of his beer, then held the glass away from him as if to contemplate it. "Not bad. Not the stuff Stroh used to make, but not bad at all". He dropped the mug in the sink on the other side of the bar and left through the front door of the old farmhouse-turned-bar. He even bothered to lock it.

The sun was beginning to tease the horizon on the other side of the Fisher freeway. The figure turned toward Woodlawn, the old cemetery across Woodward. The sun couldn’t actually harm him, but he didn’t enjoy it. Not at all. He adjusted the worn red wool cap on his head, then pulled an American Spirit out of the pack of smokes in his pea coat and lit it. He took a long drag on the cigarette as he walked along, musing silently to himself at how boring people had become. Nobody smoked. Nobody drank - not like they used to. And those damned -cameras- everywhere! It infuriated him so much that he even spent a whole year smashing the damn things, and street lights while he was at it, just to make the point.

"Time to liven things up around here…."

Claude-Pierre Dujardin, le Nain Rouge, shoved some brush back from an old stamped iron door and dragged it open with a clang. Checking to see that nobody was watching, he climbed into the chamber below, closing the door behind him. Above, the brush obligingly resumed its position atop the door.

Claude proceeded down the partially rusted ladder into the musty, sulphurous air below. It eventually ended in another iron service door in the concrete shaft. He opened this door as well, its old hinges groaning in protest. The stamp on the door said "Detroit Iron Works 1922", and "Detroit Subway - Route A Woodward Line". Claude stepped through into the gloom and closed the door behind him. Not a trace of his passing remained in the shaft.

Detroit was a lot older of a city than most people realized. There had been a small town on the banks of the strait (which is what Detroit actually means in French..) since the late 17th Century when French fur trappers began using the waterway. Over the centuries as town grew to city, layer upon layer was built up. Very few original buildings survived the tumultuous rise and subsequent fall of the city, with the notable exception of churches. But, even Ste. Anne, built in 1701, had been burned, rebuilt, burned again, dismantled, then rebuilt several times. The old Maritime Cathedral (mentioned in the Ballad of the Edmond Fitzgerald) was a stone edifice built in 1842. It had actually been dragged 500 yards to make way for a civic center in the 1950s.

But what had survived was below the city. Cellars and storage, at first. Then with the coming of the industrial age, tunnels and service corridors. By 1917, a full-fledged plan for a subway had been designed - which was eventually scrapped because of the Great Depression. And money. And the rise of the automotive industry, giving Detroit its other name - The Motor City. Throw prohibition into the mix, and suddenly there were secret tunnels all over the city. The northerly neighborhood of Royal Oak had a small underground city accessible only through back rooms and alley trapdoors. Speakeasies had secret tunnels between houses and buildings, and even escape tunnels out to the river or Lake St. Clair, all up and down the waterfront of Detroit’s neighborhoods.

And, when one is a presumed-mythical angry and sometimes malevolent entity with some small magical power, dwarfish stature, and a very sour disposition, these forgotten passages are just the ticket.

Claude-Pierre could not remember the date of his birth. His people were ancient, and lived a very, very long time - some of the elders were rumored to be 700 years old or more. They had many names in many cultures - goblin, Red Cap, pooka, bogart. They were considered alternately beneficent or malevolent, from town to town and throughout time. "Usually", mused Claude, "because some idiot pissed us off".

Claude had traveled to the Americas from Europe after his clan was forced from Lille, France by angry townspeople. Humans were fickle at best, and Red Caps were not known for their patience. The Red Cap clan had helped the townspeople of Lille successfully repel the French by spreading pestilence amongst French troops and driving off their horses and livestock, and sabotaging supply train wagons. But eventually, Louis The Sun King fielded enough of an army to overwhelm the town. The citizens of Lille, who delighted at the Red Caps’ efforts in the beginning, turned on their mystical benefactors and blamed them for the town’s fall.

Naturally, the Red Caps did not like this turn of events. Claude-Pierre’s clan promptly torched several fields, gave all the blacksmiths the Pox, and burned a barn, then fled, never to return. Each of them (there were only a dozen at that time, really) chose to go their own way. Claude-Pierre caught a Dutch "Fluyt" - a cargo ship bound for New England in the Americas, which was carrying textiles and other goods. The ship was ideal - minimal crew, no hassle, easy for Claude to stow away on.

After spending some time in New England and finding it boring and mundane, Claude made his way over the course of several years to a small settlement of farmland and abundant fishing waters at the eastern edge of what was being called the Northwest Territory. He had travelled north initially, through New York and up then to the west, arriving again by cargo boat, sailing across the enormous lake the French called La Mer Douce - The Sweet Sea.

A fellow Frenchman arrived in the town shortly after Claude - a military man by the name of Antoine de La Mothe Cadillac. Cadillac in short order established a French command at the site, and began calling the town with its fur trappers and fishermen "The Strait", or "Detroit". Claude personally had no use for the man. He was in Claude’s opinion, the worst of all things - a lawyer playing soldier. Cadillac did give Detroit its name, this is true. He did bring additional troops to secure and protect the farms of the area from occasional attacks. But the man was a bastard in every sense of the word except for actual lineage.

Then, one foggy night in 1703 Cadillac stumbled across Claude near the docks. There are half a dozen versions of this story from here, mostly ending with the demonization of "Le Nain Rouge" - The Red Dwarf of Detroit.

"What ACTUALLY happened", mused Claude to the rats and spiders in the long-disused subway tube-that-never-was, "is the effete little shit accosted me with his cane for ’daring’ to cross his path". The Red Dwarf kicked an old wooden box in his path, which splintered into thousands of soggy pieces. "He called me things even I had never heard! But what stuck? Some drunken sots passing by heard him call me a ’hunchback’! A ’demonic baboon’ and a ’gnarled dwarf’! And, of course, THAT is what stuck".

Claude lit another cigarette and took a long hard drag. Not far now. Almost to New Center. There was somebody he needed to see there.

"So", he said casually to nobody in particular, "I burned the city and framed Cadillac for smuggling and a few other choice crimes. Then I whispered it in the correct ears. The rest, as they say, is history".

Next Chapter: David Fallon