Chapter 23
Toward The Depths
Find a tunnel.
If you can’t find a tunnel dig one.
To find or to dig a tunnel, though, you have to operate below ground level.
A tunnel, dug or to be dug, is a subterranean thing by definition.
But how do you get down to ground level in this place? From the size of the crowds and trees they view from the Common Room window they estimate (wrongly, it turns out) that they’re on the tenth floor of their building-universe. In the course of the ups and downs of their long wanderings had the staircases ever led them ten flights down? They can’t tell for sure.
True, they’d spent a good part of their most recent lifetime exploring the labyrinth. But with the twistings and turnings of all those corridors, some with ceilings as lofty as a basilica’s and some with ceilings as low as a coffin-lid, they still can’t mentally position the explored part of their prison vertically. It seems to them, however, that the staircases rose more than they fell. In all likelihood, the deepest the Five had got, with one exception, was far above the ground floor.
The exception is Max. The others dimly recall how, long ago when they were still young, Max had come across a “deep deep” forbidden area in ruins with a big lopsided staircase twisting down and down, he said, into darkness. Surely the darkness of the foundations. They nag and harass Max. But he can’t remember where that staircase was.
Still, it’s encouraging to think that if Max had stumbled across a way down, they might too, even though that darkness he spoke about was bound to pose a problem. If down below turns out to be a place of darkness, they’d grope about in those subterranean corridors like blind men with nothing to guide them unless their predecessors had carved their symbols in deep Braille. Louis imagines manufacturing primitive candles by molding greasy hash about lengths of string. But coping with darkness is a premature worry.
The Five set out early in the morning with salvaged scraps of yesterday’s meals and a pencil or a nail to scratch their distinctive symbols on new walls. They fan out in all directions and explore new but identical-looking corridors, very rapidly this time. Rooms don’t hold them up now. They’re not interested in rooms anymore. Rooms at this useless level can contain only dust, not dirt. Jogging past thousands of doors, they cover lots of ground.
Each time, though, time after time, they return late at night, exhausted and mute, having covered ever more ground but never the longed-for ground of the ground floor.
Every seventh day they try to recover, slouched silent in their armchairs before the window that frames their version of Paris.
One day, though, Seymour makes a curious discovery. The dust-shrouded paper-littered room had clearly served as a living space. A pair of wooden crutches lean in a corner next to a rusty cot. Seymour makes out, faint beneath the dust, familiar words pencil-printed on one of the walls: OUT IS A DOUBLE-CROSS!!
Seymour advances ankle-deep through scribbled sheets of paper to a table with a yellowed stack. The title sheet bears in heavy big print: OPUS I, POSTHUMOUS.
The hand is the same as the wall words. Realizing that this is the abandoned dwelling of the author of the cryptic words that had admonished them for decades of walls, Seymour scrabbles through the hundreds of sheets beneath the title page. They are blank. He picks up one of the scribbled sheets from the floor and begins reading:
At that, and perhaps too late, they understand what they should have grasped from the moment of their materialization among these zombies with their prophylactic rubber gloves (unless their delay in comprehension was programmed like everything else here):
Seymour breaks off reading on hearing the familiar clump-jangle, clump-jangle in the corridors. He’s frightened at being caught in what is probably an out-of-bounds area and at post-curfew time. He drops the sheet and flees, meaning to return to the room in the hope of useful information. But, stupidly, he’d forgotten to mark the corners. He’ll never be able to find the room again.
In periods of depression – increasingly frequent as time goes on – they expect their future will be like their past: a blank wall.
They’ll continue to wander about in the endless corridors and mark their signs on more corner walls.
They’ll go past a million impossible doors.
They’ll replace dozens of burned out bulbs.
Outside, their repetitious year will go on wheeling around with its bare trees, green trees, bare trees, green trees.
And above their heads grains of sand will go on dribbling from the open-ended hourglass.
Grains of sand that will slowly agglomerate into another sandstone block to suddenly clobber them into advanced middle age or worse.
But happily they’re wrong, so happy about being wrong. The quest for the depths began when the forsythia outside was bright yellow, so March or April. Leaves are falling (so October or November) when Louis discovers in Room 4963 boxes containing flashlights and batteries and spare bulbs.
Helen cryptically comments on the discovery. “There must be a reason.”
The day after, strange coincidence, Louis finds an urgent use for his flashlight.
They don’t sleep that night. They make Louis tell the story over and over.
Jogging down an unfamiliar corridor, he’d heard a sudden loud clang and multiplied echoes of that clang miles ahead. Then a terrific wind had almost knocked him down. He’d worked his way against that wind and flying grit and papers and discovered that the wind was shrieking out of a doorway with an open metal door, a metal door like all of those metal doors they’d seen so often but always locked, never open, blown open, like this one.
On the other side of the doorway a flimsy catwalk trembled in the uprush of wind coming from a gigantic pit like a mineshaft with a rusty iron pillar in the middle. A rusty iron staircase spiraled about the pillar. As far as the flashlight beam could reach up and down (but he was only interested in down) he could see the catwalks of other floors joining the spiral staircase.
He stepped forward on his catwalk, crouched low against the wind. He gripped the railings of the staircase as he spiraled down and down, leaning against the uprush of grit and papers. At one point the wind stopped. Leaning against sudden nothing, he nearly pitched into the void.
It took him maybe half an hour, passing fifty-odd catwalks, to reach the bottom. By then his flashlight beam had weakened and he’d advanced no more than a mile down a badly dilapidated unpainted concrete corridor with cracked walls. An occasional bulb was lit. He’d examined some of the rooms. They were filled with files and books like the rooms they’d explored up here.
Helen interrupts Louis. She wants to know what kind of books. Novels?
Books? Who cared about books? He hadn’t bothered looking at books. It was a tunnel he’d been looking for. He hadn’t found one. But he’d searched no more than about fifty rooms.
It looked like there was more rooms than that down there.
Plenty more rooms than that.