He didn’t want that. What he wanted was to test this new handle, so he stepped lightly down the hall and through the kitchen. At the kitchen door he yelled, “Going to the garage for a second!” and leapt into the night.
The night was warm and calm. He felt at home outside, even though everything in or near his left shoulder roared with pain. And even though there was a wound of unknown severity on his forehead. Even though he was barefoot.
He’d just realized he’d forgotten his shoes. He’d left in such a hurry that he hadn’t put them on. He thought briefly about going back to get them—he knew they were right on the other side of the kitchen door—but he also knew that to go back inside was to invite his mother’s worry.
So he stayed outside, in his bare feet, and with the brass C firmly in his palm.
Just then, Gran felt the sudden presence of Catalina. He knew he was alone, but at the same time he had the unmistakable sense that she was near.
He knew he wanted to join her and help her, and knew that to do so he needed to find his way underground. He didn’t want to go all the way back to the hillside. So he stepped through the wet grass in his bare feet and ducked behind his garage. There he found the spot where he and Catalina had re-entered the world the other night.
He took a breath.
He dropped to his knees.
The ground beneath him was just dirt, a few stray patches of grass. But it had been a door just a few nights ago. Why couldn’t it be a door again?
He took the brass C and pushed it into the earth.
Immediately he felt something like a click. There was no sound, but the handle seemed to grab hold of the earth. Gran positioned his legs and pulled, and the ground beneath him became a door. It was heavier than a regular door, but not by much. Opening it made no sound.
He’d done it! He’d opened a door where there had been no door. Holding it open, instinctively he looked around him, to make sure no one was watching. He peeked around the corner of the garage, and saw the window of the living room, his mother and sister’s faces blue from the light of the television. They suspected nothing.
He turned back to the door, and saw the warm yellow illumination of the tunnel.
It occurred to him that he had no idea what he planned to do. He knew he wanted to look for Catalina, but he had no map, no sense at all of where he might be in the labyrinth underground, and where she was in relation to where he now stood. And if he went inside, was he absolutely sure he could get out?
No. He wasn’t sure, not at all.
But he took a deep breath, and though it seemed utterly insane to actually enter the tunnels and close the door behind him, this is what he did.
As soon as he closed the door, the air seemed to tighten all around him. He felt his throat close up. He couldn’t breathe. He felt claustrophobic, though he’d never felt this way before with Catalina.
Just minutes ago he’d felt so sure about going underground. He’d been bathed in the certainty of destiny. But now he just felt scared. He was alone and he had no idea at all what he was doing.
The tunnel was dimly lit, with Christmas lights hanging loosely from eye-hooks. The passage extended without end in either direction. But one way seemed brighter, and in this direction the tunnel seemed to open up wider as it unfurled into the distance.
This is the way he went.
Gran told himself that he would walk for a minute or two, just to see if anything became clearer—where he might go, how he might find Catalina. Catalina no longer felt close to him, but he also had the strong sense that what he’d felt moments before had been real: Catalina was not far.
He walked down the tunnel. Every few steps he saw evidence of her handiwork: A diving board standing vertically, holding the ceiling up. Then a piece of steel siding. Then a car bumper. A fake marble column, a pole-vaulter’s pole. The tunnel widened, narrowed, bent slightly left and then right. Within minutes he had no real idea how far he’d walked or where he was in relation to his house.
And then he almost fell to the center of the Earth.
Gran was walking along a lesser-lit passage of the labyrinth when he sensed a cooling of the air. Something was wrong. Or different. Or both. Different and wrong and dangerous. Now the lights began to flicker.
He looked down and saw that his right foot was inches away from a hole. The hole was barely visible, an utterly black oval the size of his kitchen table at home. It seemed to be exhaling—a cool breath coming rhythmically. Gran crouched down and felt a gentle but cold wind, a wind that could have been traveling for miles before it arrived at this place in the tunnel.
Gran took a rock from the tunnel floor and dropped it into the hole to gauge its depth. He heard the rock flick a wall or two, but there was no end to its drop. The hole was a tunnel like the tunnel he was standing in, but this one went straight down, apparently without end.
Catalina had said nothing about vertical tunnels.
Then again, Catalina had said nothing about any of this.
He didn’t know where she was or how he would find her. He didn’t know how she would react when she saw him. And he didn’t know what that sound was—the sound suddenly coming from the hole below.
The sound was a howling.
It was a rumbling.
It was like an earthquake hurtled forth by a hurricane.
And it was getting closer. It was coming up from wherever that hole led, and it was coming toward Gran.
He ran as if he’d been caught by surprise atop a volcano that was now erupting. Because something very much like that seemed to be happening.
He ran the way he’d come. He ran faster than he’d ever run, even though he was barefoot, and his collarbone ached, and his left shoulder could barely move. He did not turn around. He did not breathe.
But he could hear the sound getting louder. It was the sound of a wall of wind, carrying dirt and scree that scraped the walls of the tunnel with a rattling hiss. The wind roared maniacally, and when it seemed that it couldn’t possibly get any louder, it grew five times louder, then ten. Gran continued to run, sure that the wind would overtake him any second, because the world around him seemed very much on the verge of ending. Then it got louder.
And finally he felt something. A pebble on his calf. Then the scrape of a rock shooting across his forearm. Then the thump of a stone landing squarely on the center of his back. All at once the dirt and rocks were everywhere around him, and he was aloft. The feeling was like swimming in the ocean and being taken under by a great crashing wave, when the water spins around and churns everything with its fury—the sand, the fish, the humans. Gran was in the air, being carried forth by a furious wind traveling at seventy, eighty miles an hour. He was spun around. He caterwauled and struggled to stabilize himself, to see anything, to feel the ground beneath him. But he had no control. He was just an object tossed about by this tunnel-borne hurricane, and he could only hope that—
Hope that what? That it would die out? Hope that he could exit somewhere, as a car would exit a highway?
And just as his mind fought with hopelessness—the part of him that said he had no chance to stop this, to free himself—just as he felt he had no choice but to float helplessly along until the wind died or was interrupted by some competing force, he hit a wall.
It had to be a wall. It hurt like a wall. Just as he’d done when he first tried to walk through the wall of his school, he felt the cruel result of human versus wall.
The wall always wins.
The pain was extreme.
The wind swirled all around him, louder than ever.
He felt like a lump of dough thrown against a marble counter. Every part of his body—even his ears, even his fingernails—ached. He realized, though, with some satisfaction that he was on the ground. Flattened, facedown, no longer moving. The wind had thrown him against a wall. Meaning the tunnel had ended. Meaning the wind, too, had hit a wall.
He savored the ground beneath him while the wind continued to s
wirl like a tornado in a cage. It seemed like a thinking being, an animal cornered. Then it began to retreat.
Gran couldn’t believe it. He’d been in the throes of the wind in its mad journey through the tunnel labyrinth for so long—how long? It seemed like hours, though it was probably no more than ten minutes—so long that now, lying on the ground with the wind retreating, the noise diminishing, he had to adjust to not being tossed forward by the underground hurricane. He’d forgotten what it was to live without that kind of noise, that kind of encompassing chaos.
The wind continued to retreat in what he could only perceive to be a sort of frustrated mass of air and dirt. He knew that a force like this couldn’t think, couldn’t have a personality, and yet he had the distinct sense that this was some kind of being with a mind, with feelings, with intentions.
And because humans, as frail and simple as we are, have the strange and usually correct ability to sense things like this, Gran knew that he should listen to the voice inside telling him that this wind was a sentient force, and it was annoyed by the obstacle in front of them, this wall of dirt and rock.
The voice told him that the wind intended to go through this wall.
That it was retreating only to gather strength.
That it was getting a running start, and would soon attack the obstacle in front of it with a force tenfold stronger than the power it had shown thus far.
Gran knew how strange his conclusion was.
But he knew, too, that this conclusion was probably correct. And that he needed to move, somewhere, anywhere—he needed to get out of the path of the force reassembling itself.
But what could he do?
He thought of digging. No, not fast enough. He thought of running through the wind—maybe he could push through it and come out the other side? No.
Then he thought of the handle in his palm.
Of course. Immediately he jammed it into the tunnel wall and pulled.
It didn’t work.
He turned and thrust it into the opposite wall. Nothing.
He tried the floor. Nothing.
He stuck it into a dozen places all around him and nothing happened.
And now the same sixth sense that had told him that this swirling mass of wind and detritus was a thinking force with its own distinct intentions—this same sense was telling him that whatever gathering of power it needed to do was now done and it was ready to come back at him, to throw itself against the end of the tunnel. That it intended to extend the tunnel by throwing itself against the wall, pushing through it, churning and obliterating it and everything in its path.
The howling grew louder. The hurricane in the tunnel grew angrier. The dirt spun around and pebbles shot toward him, fast as rabbits, hard as glass.
And then it sprang like a great cat, coming at him with a sudden ferocity. Gran crouched down, making himself into a ball, hiding his head between his legs. He closed his eyes and hoped for the best.
He assumed he would first be picked up, then thrown against the wall.
He assumed that the wind would churn and churn and cut its way through the rock wall and make a new path.
And he assumed that when it did, he would be carried forth as he had been carried before.
He did not assume that a door would open beneath him and he would fall through it.
And he did not assume that he would land on the floor of another tunnel, this one just below, and that when he gathered himself and opened his eyes, he would see the scuffed leather boots of Catalina Catalan.
“I’m confused by you,” she said.
Gran looked up. Catalina stood over him, seeming calm but annoyed.
“On the one hand,” she said, “you’re the dumbest kid I’ve ever known. You almost got yourself killed by the Hollows. I’ve been doing this for two years and I’ve never gotten as close as you just did. So you’re stupid. On the other hand, you’re lucky, which, come to think of it, a lot of stupid people are. That’s the only way they can survive.”
Gran tried to speak, but the breath had been knocked out of him. He’d fallen six feet and landed on his ribs. He’d never broken a rib, but he was fairly sure that he’d at least bruised one now. Or it could be just his collarbone, probably dislocated, asking for his attention.
“On the other other hand,” she continued, “you somehow figured out how to get into the tunnels. And you somehow survived a direct encounter with the Hollows, which I didn’t know was possible. So that means you’re either not just regular lucky, but incredibly lucky, or it means you actually have a brain.”
Gran’s lungs were regaining the capacity to breathe, but Catalina was still debating Gran’s intelligence. She was thinking out loud, as if Gran were not lying in front of her, gasping for air.
“Then again,” she continued, “the first time I met you, you had just walked into a wall. So you can see how confusing you are. And by the way, why are you barefoot?”
Finally Gran had the opportunity and ability to speak. He didn’t bother to try and answer any of Catalina’s questions, because he had a question of his own, which seemed more urgent than hers:
“What just happened?”
“You know what happened,” Catalina said.
“I don’t,” Gran said, but now he was unsure. Maybe he did know?
“You know exactly what happened,” she said. “In your gut, you know.” Now she turned her eyes to the ceiling of the tunnel. “Why do people always need things explained when they’re so obvious?” She turned back to Gran.
“I told you about the Hollows, didn’t I?”
“Yes,” Gran said.
“And what are the Hollows?”
“The wind that attacked me?”
“What you just said was a question,” she said. “I need an answer. You know the answer.”
“The Hollows—that’s the wind that attacked me,” Gran said.
“Right. But did it attack you, or were you just in the way?”
“I guess I was just in the way.”
“What do the Hollows do?”
“They tunnel through the Earth.”
“Good. And what happens to factories and houses and schools sitting above these tunnels?”
“They collapse. They fall in.”
“Good. And who tries to prevent all these things from collapsing and falling in?”
“You?”
“You doubt this?”
“No.”
“So why did you say it like a question?”
“Sorry. You. You. You try to stop the collapsing.”
“Of what?” Catalina asked.
“Of everything above.”
“Say it as one sentence.”
“You try to stop the collapsing of everything above.”
Catalina almost smiled. “Right. And why me?”
“I don’t know.”
“Think about it.”
“Because you’re small enough to fit in the tunnels? Because someone has to do it?”
Catalina tilted her head and this time she actually smiled. A crooked smile overtook her face.
“Good,” she said. “That’s good. That’s a start at least, and I’m impressed. Now the big question: Why do the Hollows do all this?”
Gran searched his mind and found nothing like an answer. “I don’t know,” he said.
Catalina’s smile disappeared. “Shoot,” she said. “I don’t know either. Part of me thought you might actually know.”
Gran and Catalina stood there, looking at each other for a long moment. The silence was profound, and Gran felt many things at once. He was baffled by Catalina, her power and her responsibility. And he felt strangely confident: he had shown Catalina that he knew a few things, and could survive amid a small hurricane screaming through a narrow tunnel deep under the earth.
He also felt great pain, a dull pain throbbing all over, and remembered how he had done something nasty to his collarbone, had run into a solid wall with his head, and had, most recently, br
oken or bruised a rib. But stronger than any of these feelings was the feeling that he had gained some measure of respect from Catalina, the closest thing he had in the world to a friend.
He was in the middle of this brief and happy reverie when a ring rattled open the quiet. It was another one of the old-fashioned telephones.
Catalina calmly turned around and walked to a wall phone that Gran hadn’t seen until that moment. She picked up the receiver but didn’t say hello.
“Yup,” she said, and looked over at Gran. “I know. I know. I know. Yes. No. No. No. No. Of course not. Okay. I’ll get rid of him. Yup. No problem.”
She hung up and looked at Gran.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I don’t agree that we need to get rid of you.”
“Get rid of me how?” Gran asked. “Who was that on the phone?”
Gran had no clue what he should be doing. Should he run? Could he run? He had nowhere to run.
“It’s not like I’d kill you or anything,” she said. “That’s not what he meant. He just meant that I need to get you out of the tunnels and maybe erase your memory or something like that.”
“Erase my memory? How?” he asked. Did Catalina really have the power to erase memories?
“He didn’t actually say anything about erasing your memory, but I’d love to have that power. Wouldn’t you? But I’m just a Lifter. You dropped this, by the way,” Catalina said, and in her outstretched hand Gran saw the brass C. “Where’d you get that? Looks like a horseshoe.”
Gran didn’t know what to say. Catalina was talking so casually about having people’s memories erased. Who was on the other end of that telephone line? What was happening?