by JB Dutton
* * * * *
The tunnel was colder at night. I’d thrown on some sweatpants but had totally not expected to be shivering in there. I crawled along the passageways, following the route I’d taken before. I quietly called out Flash’s name, shining the phone’s flashlight in front of me, then above me. I came to the vertical junction that he’d jumped down from the last time. But there was no sign of him.
I began to worry that he’d found a similar flap in another apartment and gotten stuck in there. What if the tenant hated cats and threw him out in the street? Maybe the posters weren’t such a waste of time. Or what if he was trapped somehow in a narrow part of the tunnel? I knew that last idea was unlikely, seeing as how Flash was able to squish himself down to about two inches high. And if he did, surely he’d be squealing in pain or meowing in fear and I’d hear him...
Sure enough, just as that thought entered my head, I heard it. Faintly, but undoubtedly, it was a soft meow. Heartened, I crawled faster. The sound was getting louder – I must be headed in the right direction. I rounded a couple of corners, no longer cold because of how fast I was crawling. Then I stopped as I realized that the tunnel sloped upward in front of me. I shone the flashlight up, but I couldn’t see how high the incline went. But now that I’d stopped it was obvious that the meowing was louder.
“Flash!” I called, this time in more of a hoarse shout than a whisper.
“Meow!” came the response from somewhere up the sloped tunnel.
I crawled upward and after a minute or so the incline leveled off. I thought I saw something glinting in the distance ahead.
“Flash?” I edged forward. Something told me that it wasn’t Flash. The meowing had stopped. But there was definitely something reflecting back the beam of the phone’s light. I wondered whether I should continue. But curiosity got the better of me.
That old saying came to me: curiosity killed the cat.
The number of times Mom had said that after catching me sticking my finger in a hole as a little kid or poking my head through a railing to see what was below... But she never got super mad at me. How could she, with her scientific background and engineer’s training? She’d always encouraged me to explore, to ask questions. Although, come to think of it, she never specified whether crawling along a small dark tunnel in the middle of the night was allowed.
Now I could see what had been glinting in front of me. Not the eyes of a cat, but the brass of a metal grating. It was about two feet wide and ten inches high, with an ornate design of curly leaves and twisting stems – a kind of grille like you find covering a heating duct in an old building like this.
I realized that if it opened somehow, a cat could get through the gap easily. I approached the grille and shone my phone through the opening. Before calling Flash’s name again I wanted to see if it was someone’s bedroom. The last thing I needed was to give some poor old lady a heart attack.
The room on the other side of the grille was in darkness. I could make out a patterned rug and the legs of various tables and chairs. Cool – it didn’t look like a bedroom that someone would be sleeping in, so I whispered “Flash?” and waved the phone around some more.
Then I sensed a movement and focused the beam in its direction. I narrowed my eyes, trying to make out what it was in the gloom. Just as I was about to call the cat again, I felt a wave of shuddering overtake my whole body. The movement had come from a person’s legs. Maybe twenty feet away – the room was pretty big – the flashlight’s beam was wider, but fainter. And it wasn’t just one person’s legs. There were half a dozen people seated around an oval dining room table, eyes closed. In the pitch dark.
This was beyond freaky. It made my blood run cold. There were three men and three women, old and young, all holding hands like they were participating in the world’s spookiest séance.
None of them seemed to have noticed my presence behind the grille. This was a good thing. All thoughts of Flash had vanished as surely as he had vanished from our apartment. What on earth was going on here?
I swept the room with my phone, peering into the dimness. Something on the wall caught my attention. What was it? A symbol... something I’d seen before. WTF – it was the logo of the Temple of Truth! Is this what they did to get to the truth? Sit around in the dark holding hands?!
One of the men at the table suddenly turned toward me and opened his eyes. I hadn’t made a sound but he looked right at the grille. I fumbled to hide the phone and switch off the flashlight. The man broke the circle of hands and got up from his chair. He padded softly but deliberately toward me. I recoiled instinctively. Even though it was as dark as a coalmine in the room I could tell that he was getting closer. I shuffled backward as quietly as I could. But I hadn’t realized that I couldn’t turn around in the tunnel. When I’d crawled into it the first time I only changed direction when Flash jumped down on me at the intersection, and it must have been wider than the regular width of the passageway. Now I was stuck going backward and trying not to make any noise.
The man was at the grille. I held my breath. He was only about six feet away but for some reason hadn’t thought of switching on the light in the room. It was almost as though he was sniffing the air in the tunnel.
And then I heard it. A single word. Spoken by one of the women in the room.
“Noon?”
I knew it was him. I knew that the man at the grille was Noon.
He moved away and replied gravely to the woman: “We should have known.”
My brain was speeding at a thousand miles an hour. What did all this mean? Noon lived in my building? And he was somehow involved in the Temple of Truth that Mom worked for?
Then the light did go on in the room. It pierced the grille, casting a shadow of sinewy leaves and stalks on the walls of the tunnel. There was the sound of chairs being pushed back and people murmuring. They were going to find me.
I shuffled back as fast as I could, unconcerned by the swooshing of sweatpants and the click of my phone on the wooden tunnel floor. I caught a glimpse of a face pressing against the grille as I slid back down the incline. It was a woman. It might have been the woman I’d seen outside the Warrington holding hands with the other one in the doorway, but I lost sight of her as gravity took over.
I let myself go and in a few seconds was down at the bottom of the slope, heart pounding and sweat pouring from my forehead. I still couldn’t turn around, so I carried on edging backward as fast as I could. I don’t know why, but I felt like puking. This was too much to process. I was tired, scared and confused.
After a couple of minutes I reached an intersection and found that I was able to turn around. The search for Flash had suddenly become secondary. I sped back to the flap and into the kitchen.
I stood there panting, looking down at the cupboard, thoughts careening through my brain. None of it made any sense. I opened the faucet and took out a glass. The water gushed into the sink. Somehow it calmed me and I stayed there watching the stream and the splashes. It was as though all my confusion was being washed down the drain.
I must have been super tired or totally out of it because the next thing I remember is waking up to the sound of purring.
My first thought was happiness. Flash had found his way home! I rolled over to face the warmth and reached out for his fur. But my fingers knew it before my eyes confirmed it: this was a different cat.
She – and I instantly knew that the cat was female – was a white Persian with stunning blue eyes. No collar, just the silkiest fur. I propped myself up in bed and looked at her as she pawed the duvet and rubbed her head against my arm. Then the night’s events flooded back. And to add to the confusion, here was a different cat! Crazy...
I heard Mom making breakfast in the kitchen and looked at the beautiful white feline as she stared back at me. She must have come in through the tunnel. No, wait – we’d left the front door open on the chain, so she could have come in that way too.
I swung my legs out of bed. Oh wow,
my head felt like it was filled with cotton. I must have slept four or five hours, and even they can’t have been too restful. The cat looked at me as I stood up, swaying slightly. “Guess I’d better feed you,” I said, and she meowed in reply.
Mom raised her eyebrows as I staggered into the kitchen. “Hey honey.”
“Hey,” I groaned. That was all I could muster in the mental state I was in.
The white cat trotted in behind me. Mom’s eyes widened further. “What the...” her voice trailed off as the cat circled my ankles.
“Yeah. Weird,” was my contribution to the discussion.
“I was just going to say that Flash didn’t show up. Where did she come from?”
“No clue. She was on my bed when I woke up. Must have come in the front door I guess.”
Mom crouched down and held out her hand. The cat sniffed her fingers and meowed.
“No collar,” she said, petting the cat’s neck. “I guess we should give you some breakfast before we take you back home.”
I dropped a pop tart into the toaster. “We have to put up those posters,” I reminded her.
“Sure thing, honey,” she said. “I can’t believe he’s really lost. Someone must know where he is.”
“Uh-huh.”
“We’d better hurry then.” She poured some cat food into Flash’s bowl and stood up. The white Persian ignored the food. Mom picked it up and put it back down with its head practically in the bowl. The cat just looked at her and walked back into the center of the room, staring at us.
“Guess you aren’t hungry,” said Mom. She looked at me with concern as I poured myself some apple juice with an unsteady hand. “You okay, honey?”
“Uh-huh.”
“’Cause you look real tired.”
“Uh-huh.” I took a huge gulp of juice. Then the pop tarts did what they do best and popped up with a sickly sweet strawberry smell.
Mom didn’t know what to do about any of this. She isn’t exactly a control freak, but let’s just say that it’s only because she avoids situations where she isn’t in control.
I munched my breakfast while the Persian watched me. If I could have seen through the fog that was clouding my mind I would have been worried, scared even. As it was, it was all I could do to focus on the task in hand: putting up the posters to find Flash.
We left our new furry guest in the apartment and hurried out clutching posters and Scotch tape. Twenty minutes later every lamppost and utility pole in a four-block radius was plastered with a sheet of pale blue paper showing the world’s cutest black kitty and these words:
LOST!
BLACK 4 YEAR-OLD MALE CAT
WITH WHITE PATCH ON BELLY.
He’s called Flash and we miss him.
REWARD!!! (212) 555-1981
As Mom drove me to Chelsea Prep we must have passed a dozen of our posters. Hopefully someone who knew where Flash was would see them too.
