by Tom Shepherd
“No, no! It’s a black hole straight to hell! Get me up. Oh, Jeez, I hope I don’t lose my Nike.”
She pulled me out, and we peeled broken plaster until my shoulders fit through the gap. “Mine shaft?” My voice echoed in the gloomy pit.
“On Barrier Island? Not likely,” Tanella said. “What do you see?”
“I can’t see nothin’. Hold my legs.” The closet’s lone light bulb barely penetrated the cavity. Reaching out in the darkness, I tried to find a floor, but found the opposite wall instead. “I’m touching the other side of the shaft. Let me down some more.”
She grasped my feet as I slithered into the void. “Feel for grooves, tracks.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Double metal runners. And there’s a metal cable—yuk. Feels greasy.”
“It’s a hand-pulled dumbwaiter, probably out of service for a long time. Maybe we can climb down—”
“No way. Dark as a bat’s butthole, and no ladder. Ouch! Not so tight on my ankles. They’re still hurting from last night.”
“Let me see.” She hauled me back to the closet floor and we traded places. But Tanella slid farther into the opening than I dared to go, and she was a little heavier than me, so I braced my heels against the base-board and leaned back, gripping her sneakers and praying she’d double-knotted them.
“There’s something down here.” Her voice sounded like whispers in a bottle. “Let me down some more.”
“I can’t hold you.”
“Lower me some more, Sally Ann. I’m touching something with my fingertips.”
“Quit wiggling. I’m gonna lose you.”
“Let me down—”
“Tanella!” I lost her. All that remained were her shoes in my hands.
I threw the shoes on the closet floor, thrust my head into the shaft and clawed after her in the darkness, raking in only empty air. We were on the third floor—did this hole sink to the basement? Had she dashed out her brains on the pavement somewhere underground?
“Tanella!”
No answer. I fell back from the gash in the panel and hugged the opposite wall, heart clattering in my chest. Tanella, gone? I’m alone. Locked in a closet with a shaft of death. Outside, a killer’s running loose and a hurricane is bearing down on the island. Tanella! My best friend.
I hugged one of her empty shoes and started to cry.
Through the blocked door I heard Tony McClure talking. His voice grew louder. “Look, nobody knows who you are. Those kids made Beaumont and me, but you’re safe.”
Another voice replied, but badly muffled by distance and whispering, so I couldn’t catch what the other person said.
McClure answered. “Yeah, but I got ‘em locked in the closet. We’ll be off the island before anybody finds them.”
The second voice spoke again. Pressing my ear to the door, I wished the hotel used cheaper, lighter wood. A nice plywood door from Joe’s Discount Lumber, and I’d hear every word. This stupid door was smooth and dense and sealed perfectly with the floor.
“Don’t do that. They're only kids!”
Oh, Jesus and Mary and Everybody in Heaven! I backed away from the door, scratching at the far wall with my nails when it halted my backward flight.
“Put the gun away. I won’t talk. If I talk, I go to jail, too. Please! We’re partners. You don’t need to—”
A whizzing sound, like a sparrow-sized bumble bee smacking into your windshield at seventy miles an hour. Two more bees went splat! Then the heavy object blocking the door began to creak and slide.
The killer had finished off McClure and was opening the closet to get me next. I thrust my upper body into the hole in the wall.
“Tanella, you better not be dead, because I need you!”
Laughter floated up to me. Crisp, musical laughter, usually accompanied by a crescent-eyed smile and a dangling, single braid of hair.
“Sally Ann Palmer—come on down!”
“Tanella! You’re alive!”
“Incontrovertibly.”
“The killer just whacked McClure. He’s coming through the door after us!”
“Jump down. Hurry!”
“I can’t see anything.”
“Trust me.”
Backing into the shaft, lowering myself feet first. I kept thinking, “Why is this happening to me?—I’m on vacation!”
Tanella caught my heel and guided me to a soft landing on what felt like a wooden floor. We were standing close, but it was so dark I couldn’t see her.
“We’re on the dumbwaiter? Wow! Does it work?” I heard creaking. We began to sink slowly. “Hey, that’s great.”
“Sally Ann, how did you do that?”
“Aren’t you letting us down?”
“Uh-oh.”
We picked up speed. Air rushed between my legs and smelled musty and wet. Warm, outside air, not the chilled air of the hotel. I had the terrible, dreamlike déjà vu of falling down a long tunnel. Only, in my dreams I always awoke before hitting bottom. This descent might end in darkness forever.
“Weights!” Tanella said. “This dumbwaiter was built before electricity. It must work on weight and counterbalance. Your extra body weight set it in motion.”
“We’re falling faster. How do we stop?”
“I don’t know—”
“We’re gonna die,” I wailed.
“Don’t say that—”
Crack! The dumbwaiter crunched through something that jolted us so hard we bounced off the whizzing walls and fell in a heap on the deck as the lift skidded, stopped.
“We're still alive!” I said.
“But where? Smell that, like seaweed and garbage?” Tanella crawled through a floor-level gap in the shaft. “This must be the old basement. We hit a stop at the kitchen level and broke through.”
I dragged myself out on hands and knees. The floor was gritty and damp and the walls were whitewashed clay that had gone gray long ago. Big chunks were missing where the cracked wall had shed its coat. I tiptoed the length of the basement, trying to peek out lunch-box-sized vents. Light and humid air seeped under warped rafters where ceiling met wall, but all I glimpsed was green blur.
Tanella jerked my T-shirt sleeve. The dumbwaiter was creaking upward in the shaft.
“Kitchen workers?” I said.
“The shaft has no doors. This elevator has probably been walled up since they installed electricity in 1905.”
“Oh, shit.”
“Don’t swear—Ow! Rocks!” She hopped on stocking feet, cussing again. “Lord, forgive me. Let’s get out of here. Find the door.” Tanella limped across the dirty floor, and I caught up with her just as she found the door. Naturally, it was nailed shut.
I heard the dumbwaiter squealing as metal rollers followed tracks long neglected.
“Must be a way out.” She grabbed her foot and leaned against the door. “Gosh, it hurt!”
“Smell that?” I said. “Fishy, salty. Dead seaweed. Mom’s clam chowder.”
She held up a finger. “Listen!”
Faintly, I heard whispering water, like the sound of a beach from behind the dunes.
“The sewage system,” she said. “Remember? This place was designed with a tidewater system. Must be a sewer here somewhere. Look for a manhole cover—hurry!” She dropped and started crawling.
“Why?” I said.
“Because the sewer will lead to the sea, out of here.”
Now the elevator shaft groaned and rattled. Somebody was coming down. “God, Tanella, we’re in serious—”
“Don't swear.” She swept the floor ahead of me with her fingers.
“You were just cussing like an HBO movie.”
“That’s different. I’ve repented.”
“I’m about to get murdered—I got a right to be vulgar about it!”
“Look, Sally Ann, Here’s the access point.”
It took both of us, but we managed to pry the big metal lid open. The manhole cover made a rasping, crunching sound when it slid along the gritty flo
or and opened the shaft to the sewer.
I cupped a hand over my nose. “God!—it stinks.”
“Death stinks worse.”
She dropped a pebble into the hole and I heard a quick plop. Behind us the dumbwaiter stopped and a shadow emerged.
“Come on!”
Tanella grabbed my shirt and we free-fell into another black shaft. This time it was a short drop to a stone floor flooded by about three feet of water. My ankles handled the fall better than I’d expected. Thank heaven for Ace bandages! Tanella splashed down beside me. She unzipped her belt bag and snapped on a pen light, which made a faint half-circle on the wall. In the halo a foot-long creature dragged a skinny tail as it darted along a ledge to escape the light.
“A rat! A rat!”
“Hush, Sally Ann. He’s more afraid of you than you are of him.”
“No, he’s not! No, he’s not!”
Flashes in the shaft above, followed by hammer blows crashing in the water around us, made me forget about the four-legged rodent. We crab-crawled in opposite directions away from the hole in the roof until bumping against the curved walls of the tunnel.
“We’ve got to follow this channel sea-ward before the killer climbs down here after us,” Tanella said.
“Which way?” Water skimmed my thighs like sheets of waves at the edge of a beach.
“Tide’s coming in,” Tanella said, examining the tunnel with her light. "Look! The top of the wall is dry but getting wetter each time the water sloshes in. The sea must lie in the opposite direction of the surge. This way!” She waded upstream in the darkness, and I pattered after her.
We splashed like swimmers chased by tunnel sharks. More shots, strobe-lighting the dripping green hairs which dangled from the roof of the sewer. With a killer at our heels and the tide rushing in, seaweed on the ceiling was not a pretty thought. As I rounded the next turn, a wave washed over my waist and the floor sank away like the deep end of a pool. Tanella plunged into the water.
“Only up to my chest. Come on!”
I followed her penlight a few steps until she stopped.
“What’s wrong?” I slogged beside her.
“Chain metal grill, ceiling to floor.”
“This is not good.”
The crisscross fence fit into a vertical track, like the dumbwaiter. Under the waterline sea spinach was rising and falling as the tide brushed the bottom half of the grill. “Help me raise the gate,” she said, clenching the penlight in her teeth.
Tanella stooped in the dark water and fumbled for a hand hold. I joined her, bending until my chin touched salt water. The chain gate was reasonably light, but the bottom links hooked into a submerged iron bar on the floor. We groaned and heaved. The gate rose like a Venetian blind, getting heavier as each new row collapsed and added its weight to the rising bar.
“Duck under,” Tanella said with the penlight clamped between her teeth. When I was safely on the other side, I held the grill like a weight lifter while she scooted to freedom. The gate splashed down with a clank, but I wasn’t satisfied. "Wait! The bad guy will just raise this.”
“Come on! The tide’s rising and he’s approaching.”
My hands flew over the metal track, feeling for some way to foul the mechanism. Below the waterline the track bulged slightly from the wall, leaving a space about as thick as my hand between the rails and the stone wall.
“Sally Ann, please?”
“Find a rock. A loose stone—anything!”
Searching underwater she found an oblong stone—flat as a closed laptop, lunch bag size. I scraped green slime off the rock and in the proceed broke two fingernails. Now I did the cursing, but silently. I jammed the stone’s blunt end into the place where metal track bowed outward from its moorings. Working below the water level with wrapped hands wasn’t easy, so I pulled off the tattered bandages. My hands hurt like the Devil was gnawing on them, but I wedged the rock in place. Standing, I pressed my full weight on the rock. My ankles throbbed, but the track broke and forever disconnected the bottom half from the wall.
“Now, we raise the chain—hurry!” It was like de-railing a train. We strained until the bar traveled off the broken track, then let it fall. Now anyone trying to raise the bar would be unable to untangle the mess. I’d broken the zipper.
God, I am so smart! I thought. Then, two flashes lit the darkness as nuggets of metal ricocheted off the slick walls.
“Come on!” Tanella dragged me into the deepening tide.
We trudged maybe another fifty feet before we hit the second gate. Only this sucker wasn’t chain link. It was hard iron, rusted orange and pocked with barnacles.
“It doesn’t slide!” I said, feeling where the rivets were driven into the wall. “Let’s go back.”
Behind us in the tunnel I heard a frantic rattling, followed by more flashes and whizzing bullets which nicked the ceiling. The water level now rose to my shoulders—up to Tanella’s neck—with some surges washing my face in dark sea fluids.
“We’re gonna drown!”
“Hush, Sally Ann. We are not.” Another surge, and we were treading water.
“We can’t go back or he’ll shoot us. I don’t wanna die,” I sobbed. “Not on vacation—it isn’t fair!”
Tanella handed me the pen light, took a deep breath, and plunged out of sight. I held the light and felt utterly alone again, like when she fell into the dumbwaiter shaft. After an eternity-and-a-half, she came up gasping. “It—it doesn’t go all the way to the floor. There’s a small gap. We can squeeze under.”
“But the water is almost up to the ceiling.”
“We don’t have any other options.”
“I broke the friggin’ gate—uff-dah, I’m so stupid!”
“Suck three or four deep breaths and follow me.” Tanella inhaled the wind of life, then she was gone.
Gulping foul air, I sputtered as more sparks chipped the ceiling above my face. “Dear God, I’m not a good girl. But if you let me live through this, I’ll become a nun.”
I shoved the pen light in a pocket, drew a lungful of air, and dove for the slot at the base of the iron fence. Cold, salty water burned my eyes. Dark. So utterly dark, like diving into the belly of an ink monster. Dark, dark, dark...
Which way to swim?
Reaching for the iron grill I swished empty-handed. I panicked, certain I’d spun in the black water. I was swimming up the sewer, toward the killer. My hand hit solid rock, grooved slime. A wall?—how can there be a wall across the passageway? Finger-walking up the slick stone I broke surface and, reaching up, found myself dog-paddling a few inches from the mossy ceiling. I tried the pen light but it drowned when I dove for the bottom. Water washed over my head, tangling hair over face.
For the first time in my life, I realized I was going to die. Not some distant, kid idea—Bang, bang! You’re dead! Brush your teeth an’ go to bed. Really die. Breathe no more. Turn pale and cold, all my blood clot blue in the veins, water fill my lungs, crabs eat away my face. I cried. Not from terror, but utter disappointment that my life had been so short. I had done nothing.
The water rose again, leaving me only a hand width of air overhead before this tunnel became a water pipe. Over my tears I heard a voice calling my name.
“Sally Ann! Light up ahead—Sally Ann! Can you hear me?”
“Tanella!” I kicked off toward the voice, inching along, crying and splashing and fighting the tide. My elbow skinned against the wall and I hit my head on the slick roof; I was moaning so loudly I must’ve sounded like a woman in labor. Then Tanella’s flapping hand touched my fingers and we hugged, clumsily, sinking underwater, bobbing up to our quickly vanishing air pocket. I thought I’d turned the wrong way, but I must have rolled under and cleared the slot below the iron grill while diving for the bottom.
“Look! Light—that way, down there,” Tanella said.
Roof and rippling water were faintly visible in the glow rising from the submerged tunnel ahead of us.
“I see
it. What is it?”
“We must be near the mouth of the sewer. Take a humongous breath of air, and we’ll swim underwater to the surface.”
“Jeez, Tanella, there’s a hurricane up there. We couldn’t swim yesterday because it was too rough.”
“This tunnel drains to the mainland side. We’ll come up in the Barrier Island Channel. It’s sheltered from the worst effects of the storm.”
“But the hurricane—”
“If we stay here, we drown.”
“I don’t like this. God, I don’t like this.”
“Pull off your shoes.”
“My Nikes? My dad paid a hundred bucks for these.”
“You’ll make a well-dressed corpse. Shoes off!”
Tanella grabbed my foot and threw away forty-nine dollars of sweet cross trainer. Then the other empty soldier sank to the tunnel floor. She let me keep the Ace bandages that wrapped each ankle.
“Take several deep breaths—Sally Ann! Listen to me. Saturate your lungs with oxygen. Multiple deep breaths before you go. When swimming, let your air escape slowly. Follow the bubbles upward once you clear the mouth of the sewer. Got it?”
“I’m scared, Tanella. What if the tunnel is too long? What if there’s another gate, or I can’t hold my breath long enough, or—?”
“No turning back. You must make it on the first try. This air pocket won’t be here when you return.” She started gulping.
“Lord Jesus, I’m sorry for all the cussing and evil thoughts—”
“Me, too. We’ll pray later. Now we swim.” She took one last breath and was gone.
“Oh, Lord God, Blessed Mary and all the angels—help me to swim like hell!”
I sucked in a huge lungful, ducked under and paddled after Tanella. Her lone braid swayed like a ship’s rudder. She let out a few bubbles and the little globes caught the distant light. The water grew brighter and colder until we reached the mouth of the tunnel. Fields of seaweed danced in the current, and sheets of mossy plants blanketed the sea bed. A big, gray-blue fish turned slowly overhead.
Tanella kicked for the surface. I started after her, when my T-shirt sleeve snagged on an exposed rod of rebar, a lone buck tooth jutting from the tunnel’s mouth. Tugging, ripping free, I rolled over and came face-to-face with the eyeballs of a man who was white as chalk, floating in the water. It was Peter Antonucci. The sleeves of his yellow polo shirt flapped in the undersea wind, but his shorts were tied with blue plastic cord which anchored his body to the sea floor by a ring of weightlifter’s weights. All this happened in the time it takes a cloud of air bubbles to escape, which is what happened when I screamed. Which was really stupid, because I blew most of my remaining air.
