Chapter 6
They met on the back steps of Juggers Hall. Some research had revealed to Albert that this was the business building up until the construction of the new Craw Building a few years earlier. Now it was the music building.
Albert arrived first, dressed in blue jeans and a long sleeve shirt and wearing his bulky, green backpack. It was a little chilly, but he chose to leave his jacket at home. He counted on being out of the wind and doing a lot of walking. Brandy arrived shortly after, dressed in jeans, tennis shoes and a dark blue sweatshirt. Her purse was slung over one shoulder. It wasn’t as sexy as the dress she’d been wearing that afternoon, but she was no less lovely.
Albert had told her to meet him here at midnight. From here they would slip into the service tunnel by way of the entrance he’d found. Even on a Monday night, there would be people out at all hours on a university campus, but he counted on the traffic being light by midnight. It would have been safer to wait until after two or three, but then they ran some risk of surfacing in the morning when traffic on the sidewalk would be terrible. The university would not take well to students walking around in their steam tunnels. It was likely a major violation.
The area was deserted. Two girls passed by just after Albert first arrived, but he’d seen no one since. There was no traffic to worry about. There were no roads within sight and from here all the buildings stood with their backs to them. No lights shined in any windows, the custodians either at work elsewhere in the buildings or, more likely, finished for the night. Luck was with them.
“Well,” announced Brandy, not sure what to say. “I’m here.”
“Yes you are.” Albert was looking around, checking again for anyone who might have crept near enough to see them, but the area was still deserted. It was almost eerie in its still silence. During the day this area bustled with foot traffic almost continuously.
“So now what?”
“Now we go down.” He descended the steps and crossed the wide sidewalk to the tunnel entrance. He looked around one last time and then knelt and pulled at the cover. It was heavy as hell, more so than he expected. For a moment he thought it was going to prove too heavy for him to open, and the thought was maddening. If he couldn’t move this cover, then what could they possibly do? It was the only way in that he knew about, and even if he did find another entrance, he was certain the map started right here. He hadn’t been able to find any information at all about these tunnels online, much less a map.
He repositioned himself and tried again. This time the cover moved, but not without a great deal of effort. It slid across the concrete, grinding with enough noise, it seemed, to be heard from at least Memphis, but no one came to see what he was doing. When the cover was pushed far enough over to allow them to enter, he stopped to catch his breath and peered into the thick darkness below. Warm air rose up to meet his face and suddenly he was struck by the magnitude of what he was doing.
Up until now he’d been single-mindedly playing along with the box, contemplating the mystery first and his doubts second. But now he was taking a fabulous risk. He was getting ready to trespass in what was undoubtedly very restricted university property. If he and Brandy were caught in these tunnels, they would almost certainly face very serious charges. They could be expelled. They could be handed over to the city police and arrested. In his need to follow these clues he had managed to put both himself and Brandy in a very vulnerable position. And yet, Brandy had ultimately chosen to come with him of her own free will.
“Something wrong?”
Albert glanced up at her and then quickly looked around. Still no one had appeared. “Just catching my breath,” he replied. “Want me to go first?”
Brandy nodded quickly. He could tell she was nervous about going down there, and he didn’t blame her.
“Okay.” An iron ladder was bolted to the concrete on one wall of the tunnel. He placed his backpack on the ground next to it and climbed carefully into the darkness. He paused once to withdraw one of the flashlights from the bag and then descended into the tunnel.
For a brief moment he stood in the darkness, feeling the humid atmosphere. He knew that the tunnel stretched some distance in both directions, probably at least the full length of the sidewalk, and he allowed himself only that moment to feel the vulnerability of his blindness before turning on the flashlight.
“Hand me the backpack.”
Brandy knelt down beside the hole and lowered the bag down to him.
Albert took it and slid his arms through the straps. “Okay. Come on down. Watch your step.”
“Someone’s coming.”
“What?”
“Turn off the flashlight!”
Albert obeyed without delay. In an instant he was swallowed by darkness. He looked up through the opening above the ladder and saw that Brandy had vanished. Voices rose from the direction of the field house.
In the darkness, Albert felt terribly vulnerable. He wasn’t able to examine the tunnel very well in the short time the flashlight was on, but he’d seen enough to give his imagination plenty to work with. The tunnel stretched beyond the reach of the beam in both directions. Huge pipes ran the entire length of one wall while thick bundles of cables snaked along the other. Overhead was a freeway of water pipes. A locked switchbox of some sort was mounted near the ladder. The only other things he’d seen were concrete and shadows. The air was musty and warm. Far ahead he could see a narrow, dim light casting eerie, motionless shadows across the wall and lamplight drifted through a number of grates in the sidewalk. There was a grumbling of distant machinery that suddenly sounded like the snoring of some enormous beast. Standing alone in the darkness, it was far too easy to imagine things slinking toward him, nasty, drooling things with teeth and claws. The walls began to close; the cables and pipes unfastened themselves and reached out for him. Claustrophobia crept over him and childhood terrors rose from long dormant chambers of his mind.
The voices grew closer, more audible. Boys. At least two of them. He could not hear the subject of their conversation, but he heard when the subject changed.
“Whoa! Watch out.” One voice. Deep. Smooth.
“Yeah, that’s not dangerous at all.” Another voice, this one lighter. Softer.
Shadows passed over the opening and the voices faded. Somebody changed the subject, a third voice, he thought, but wasn’t sure. It could have been the first again. He focused on their voices, tried to picture the people they belonged to and wondered how different they really were from what he imagined.
He didn’t like being blind. Without the ability to view his surroundings, he was at the mercy of his imagination, and his imagination could be surprisingly frightening. And he hated being frightened. Fear was an illogical reaction to things like this. Fear should be reserved for human cruelty and natural disasters, not for empty, dark corridors. Standing in the darkness now, he thought he could almost feel the fur of some snarling creature brushing against the leg of his pants.
When the voices were completely gone he concentrated on the box and on his plan. The boys changing the subject meant that the open entrance to the tunnel was already forgotten. They probably assumed that it was left open by a forgetful maintenance worker or by some kids goofing around.
After what seemed like hours, he heard more footsteps. Then another shadow fell across the opening and Brandy’s voice drifted down to him like the welcome ring of rescue vehicles to a disaster scene. “They’re gone.”
Albert snapped on the flashlight with all the force of a drowning man gasping for air. Light filled the tunnel again, mercifully chasing away the darkness and revealing not a single drooling creature. There was not even a small rat to blame his irrationality on. As always when he found himself relieved of such situations where his imagination overpowered his senses, he felt embarrassed. It seemed to him that Brandy must be able to see him bl
ush, that he must have his silly childishness written across his face in brilliant red hues.
“I couldn’t cover the hole. I just started walking. Went right past them and they didn’t even notice me. I went up past the field house and circled back.” She eased down onto the ladder and began to descend. She sounded out of breath. “I think they noticed the hole.”
“Yeah, but they didn’t think much about it.” Her quick thinking impressed Albert. He might have tried to run and hide and most certainly would have attracted their curiosity. “We should be fine.”
Once Brandy was off the ladder, Albert handed her the flashlight and then climbed up and slid the cover noisily back into place. It was a little bit easier from down here. Gravity worked with him more. When they were effectively sealed in, he removed the second flashlight, a can of spray paint and the box from the backpack and slipped it on again. With only the extra batteries inside, it was much lighter.
“That was really cool, actually,” Brandy remarked as he fumbled with the backpack. The girlish excitement in her voice lifted his spirits and helped to settle his nerves from his time in the dark. “I haven’t done anything like this since I was a little girl.”
“Did you sneak into a lot of tunnels when you were a kid?”
Brandy smiled. “Sort of. My cousins and I used to sneak into our grandma’s basement when no one was looking. We weren’t supposed to be down there, but it was so cool and creepy. It had this narrow little stairway and the floor was always a little muddy.” Those days seemed so far away now. It had been four or five years since she’d really spent any time with any of her cousins. She was the youngest of the five and they were all grown up now. The others were all married or engaged. It was kind of sad. Thinking back on it now, it felt less like she’d outgrown her childhood and more like life had outgrown her.
Albert chuckled at the thought of her creeping around in an old basement. “Sounds like some of the stuff I used to do.” He thought of his grandparents’ farm. The old, leaning barn. The cellar. Plenty of places he wasn’t supposed to go, but always did. That was so long ago. Could he possibly already be so old as to have such distant memories?
“I guess that’s part of the reason I wanted to do this,” Brandy said. “It makes me feel like a kid on a big adventure.” She gazed around wonderingly. It was a warm feeling, getting that old jolt she remembered from her childhood adventures.
“I wondered what changed your mind.”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. I still think this is kind of stupid.”
It was stupid. If anyone caught them down here there’d be hell to pay one way or another.
“What do you suppose this tunnel’s for anyway?” She was looking back toward the field house. A few yards beyond the ladder there were some steps leading down and a tangle of pipes and valves near the floor.
“Steam tunnel.” He examined the map on the two sides of the box, trying to determine which end was the beginning. “Probably runs from the power plant to Juggers and the field house. I think all the electric, water, phone and networking lines run through tunnels like these, along with heat in the form of steam through these big pipes. Hence the term ‘steam tunnel’.” He looked toward the steps for a moment and then turned and looked back the other way. He wondered if that distant light was coming from the power plant. “I don’t really know for certain, though. I tried to look it up online and couldn’t find anything about Briar Hills.”
“I’m sure the university doesn’t really want to advertise its tunnels. I doubt if they’d be too thrilled to find us down here.”
Albert nodded. “Yeah. These things are dangerous. I didn’t find anything about Briar Hills, but I found some information on other steam tunnels. Lots of campuses use them. The one thing they all seem to have in common is that they all have confined spaces and extremely hot temperatures. There’s a very real threat of heat stroke and severe burns from the machinery down here.”
Brandy was looking around nervously now. “Will we be in trouble if somebody catches us?”
“Probably.”
“You could’ve told me about this before we came down here.”
“Would it have changed your mind?”
“Yes.” But she realized even as she replied that it probably wouldn’t have. In fact, it probably would have made the adventure even more appealing. Although she probably would have dressed differently.
“I’m sorry.” Albert looked back down at the map, turning it this way and that, trying to read it. “Hopefully this will keep us away from all the really dangerous areas.” If I can figure out how to read it, he thought. It was made up entirely of straight lines. A single line stretched around the corner of the box, making sudden sharp turns as it went. Most of the time, another line continued forward a short distance from each turn and then stopped, suggesting that the tunnel went on ahead, but was of no importance. Along the way, other lines jutted off the main path and stopped, showing other tunnels that should be passed by. Aside from this network of straight lines, there were no markings on the map. There was no start, no finish, not even an X marks the spot. “It doesn’t say which way’s up,” he observed, “but I figure if we go the wrong way we won’t get far before the map stops making sense.”
Brandy nodded. She couldn’t stop thinking about what might happen if somebody caught them down here. How much trouble would they be in? What would her parents say?
“Let’s try this way.” He nodded toward the power plant and then handed her the spray paint can. “That’s for marking the walls as we go. It’ll help us find our way back out if we get lost.”
“Good idea.” Brandy took the can and shook it.
“Sorry. I’d carry it, but the map’s a little awkward.”
“I understand.”
They began to walk east through the tunnel, away from the field house. Above them, dim light glowed where the drainage grates were located, a reminder that the world was only a few feet overhead and not lost forever. Albert’s eyes kept lifting to these. From up there, the glow of their flashlights must be visible. He hoped nobody noticed them.
“There should be a left right up here.”
The light did not penetrate far in the dark tunnels, but the words were barely out of his mouth when he saw the passage appear up ahead. “So far so good.”
“Great.” Brandy removed the lid from the spray paint can and shook it.
“Make it subtle. No sense advertising to the maintenance crews that we were here.”
She marked the wall with a soft curving line, a sort of subtle arrow indicating the turn. “How far do you think it is?”
“Hard to say. The map’s not really well scaled.” He shined his flashlight farther up the tunnel toward the power plant and caught sight of an iron gate blocking access to a passage leading to the right. A chain and padlock prevented anyone from passing. He assumed that all access to any of the campus buildings would be similarly barricaded. He was a little surprised that they’d gained entry so easily.
The next tunnel sloped slightly downhill. The large pipes continued on along the previous tunnel, but some of the cables and smaller pipes had turned with them. He wished he knew more about these tunnels. He hated not knowing where he was going.
About forty feet ahead, Albert spied a crevice in the left wall. As they approached it, he realized that there was a square hole in this crevice and a steel ladder to carry them down. He peered into the hole and saw that the tunnel below ran at an odd angle to the one they were currently in and matched exactly with the one the map described, which was good because about four yards in front of him was another iron gate bound with chains and a padlock.
“Looks like we go down,” he said, shining his light into the darkness below.
“You sure?” Brandy was gazing down into the hole. Dusty white cobwebs crisscrossed the narrow passage. She watch
ed with disgust as a particularly fat spider scurried beneath one of the ladder rungs.
“I’m not really sure about anything, to be perfectly honest.”