Darkside

by P. T. Deutermann

  “Were they from here?”

  “Don’t think so. Once the medics got to them, I never saw them again.”

  “Lucky for them you were right there. That was Liz’s yacht?”

  “Yes. We’d gone out for the afternoon. She apparently goes out on the bay every Sunday. Invited me along this time.”

  “Just the two of you?”

  He took a deep breath before answering. “Yes, Julie. Just the two of us.” He saw Liz’s head turn when he said that. He waited.

  “She’s pretty impressive,” Julie said finally. “She’s tougher than you might think, too.”

  “From your perspective, that should be good,” he said.

  “I suppose, but I don’t want you hurt. I guess I’m getting tired of all these surprises, and I haven’t even made it out into the world yet.”

  “From what Liz told me, you did well today. Especially by refusing that lie-detector test. You knew the old rule about those, did you?”

  “Yep. I watch TV, too, Dad.”

  He laughed. “Have to admit, that’s where I heard it. Okay. Let me know if anything else pops up.”

  “Is she there now, Dad? Liz?”

  None of your damn business, he thought. “Good night, Julie,” he said, and hung up. He went back out to the porch.

  “Why’d she call?” Liz asked.

  “To find out what I was doing on your boat yesterday, unchaperoned.”

  “Ah,” she said. “You know what?”

  “What?”

  “Seems to me,” she said softly, setting her glass down, “that we’re unchaperoned right now.”

  Monday night and all’s well. Sort of. That security dink’s been poking around in my tunnels again, and, guess what? This time he issued a challenge. Like, I think he wants a duel. Mano a mano. As if. Hasn’t he been keeping score? So far, he’s had his face painted, a singular chance to become a rocket man, and a steam bath. All courtesy of yours truly. And, as you know, he’s even been scoping out the Goth scene in town at our favorite public watering hole. As opposed to our favorite private watering hole, where we tend to get everything wet, don’t we.

  I think it’s time this nosy bastard has himself a near-death experience. Those are my tunnels. I see all and hear all. This dimwit puts up listening devices and motion detectors and I don’t know what, and thinks I can’t see those, either. I can. I can even make them do things I want them to do, if I put my mind to it. Except time is short, for both of us, really. If we had a year, I could make his little toys light up his life, so to speak. Connect one of his little transmitter cases to a six-hundred-volt line. Make it malfunction. Get him to check it out. To handle it. Just for one night-wouldn’t want to hurt any of the permanent tunnel rats from Public Works. You should see what a couple of those guys do down there after hours. My, my. Big strong men like that-you’d think they’d like girls.

  So maybe I’ll up the ante, even if time is short. He’s been creeping around, going into places that aren’t safe. I’m sure Public Works has told him those places aren’t safe. And they really aren’t, because I’ve already been there, and I’ve made some arrangements. I could make him just flat disappear, you know that? I can make anyone here disappear. Except you, of course. I can’t make you disappear. And don’t want to, not yet anyway. But I can make your life increasingly-what’s the word? Interesting. You spin your little tales; I’ll spin mine. In the meantime, HMC needs to watch his back. Or front. Haven’t made up my mind yet, but either one will do, when the time comes.

  10

  On Tuesday morning, Jim met Mike Carrick, the PWC utilities manager, at the Stribling Walk down ramp into the main tunnels. He’d asked the manager to bring along the keys to the Fort Severn tunnels. Above them, the sky was darkening fast with the approach of a spring thunderstorm. They hurried down the concrete steps and into the main tunnel just as the rain began. When they got down to the descending alcove leading to the big oak doors, Jim found a small crew already there. They had the left-hand door open. A battery of portable air handlers was doing a fresh-air exchange into the normally sealed tunnels.

  “Gas-free engineering,” Carrick shouted above the roar of the Red Devil blowers. “No telling how much oxygen’s down there. Or how little.”

  “How much longer?” Jim said.

  As if they’d heard him, the crews switched off the blowers and began retrieving several feet of bulky air hose from the tunnels.

  “They’ve given it thirty minutes of air exchange,” Carrick said. “Let them do their tests, and then you can go in.”

  “Not coming with me?”

  “Not on your life,” Carrick said. He stepped forward and tapped the top of the brick arch nearest to the doorway. A fine snowfall of masonry dust wafted down. “You want to go down there, be our guest. But I’ll require that you pull an air line with you for when it caves in.”

  “ When? Is it really that bad?” Jim asked, eyeing the moldering brickwork.

  “It might be, although we haven’t had a cave-in since the eastern gun gallery tunnel collapsed. But that was some years ago. Arches are Roman engineering. Pretty strong. But those are basically mud bricks, well over a hundred years old.”

  The test engineer went into the left-hand tunnel for a distance of about thirty feet and tested the air for free oxygen and any explosive gases with his instruments. Then he backed out. “You want us to do the right-hand tunnel?”

  Jim shook his head. “The map shows it’s a mirror image of the left-hand side. Is that correct?”

  Carrick nodded, looking at his diagrams. “It ends up in a magazine that’s right under the front walls of Lejeune Hall,” he said. “The map doesn’t show it, but I think there’s a connector tunnel between the two branches. Probably caved in by now.”

  “I’m only interested in this left-hand side,” Jim said.

  “How come?” Carrick asked.

  “I think some mids have been into it,” he said. “Can I have your site map?”

  “Right here. Layout’s pretty simple. Two tunnels, parallel for two hundred feet. Then they branch left and right, respectively, into the magazine vaults. That’s where I think that cross tunnel is, but, like I said, it isn’t on the map.”

  “Okay,” Jim said.

  “From the magazines, there were two tunnels that kept going out to where the gun pits were. That would be under the landfill now, and they’ve collapsed. Sealed them with cement-block walls. The main tunnels are one level below where we’re standing right now. The magazines are one level below the main tunnels. Steel doors, no locks. Oh, and the left magazine is flooded, by the way. Okay so far?”

  “Yep.”

  “There’s no lights, no power down there. The air exchange may not have reached the magazine alcoves. You start getting dizzy, have trouble breathing, you back out.”

  “Okay.”

  “There’s a liquid manometer outside the main magazine chamber. If there’s water visible in the manometer, then that’s the level of the water in the magazine. Don’t open the doors.”

  “Big magazines?”

  “Big enough: fifty by fifty, arched dome, twenty-foot ceilings.”

  “No ammo or guns, I take it?”

  Carrick laughed. “Long gone. If there was powder down there, it would be marvelously unstable. No matches or flames down there, by the way-there could be methane. That Maglite is okay.”

  “I’m having serious second thoughts,” Jim said.

  “You want to quit now, no hard feelings.”

  Jim took a deep breath, wondering if it was going to be his last. But he had to go. Those scratches on the lock had been deliberately obscured. Had to be a reason for that. Even if the magazine itself was flooded. He shook his head. “No, I have to take a look.”

  “Suit yourself. I’ll have two guys stand by while you’re down there. They hear a rumble, they’ll start air into the hose and get the recovery crew in. Here’s your air hose, and here are those spare keys you requested.”
>
  He handed Jim the antique iron keys, the tunnel diagrams, and the end of a reinforced air hose, which had a tiny sound-powered telephone wire wrapped around the outside. “The hose is graduated,” Carrick said. “If you get a cave-in, it’ll tell us how far into the tunnel you are. That there is a microphone where we can talk back and forth, assuming you survive it.”

  Nobody was smirking, Jim realized. These guys were obviously taking the possibility of a cave-in seriously. “Don’t bother to bring the air hose out when you come back; we’ll use the cable reel to retrieve it. How long you going to be in there?”

  “Half hour, max,” Jim said. “I want to make a quick tour, see what I see. I’ll back out as soon as possible.”

  “You back out if you think the structure is giving way. Don’t stop. Don’t think. Run like a striped-assed ape.”

  “I think you’re scaring me.”

  “That’s the idea. And good luck.”

  Jim took the end of the air hose in hand and went down the stone steps into the left-hand tunnel. Behind him, the PWC crew unreeled the hose for him. By the diagram, the right-hand tunnel led directly out toward what had been the original banks of Spa Creek, which in turn fed into the Colonial harbor of Annapolis. Subsequent landfills to expand the Academy grounds had long since buried the original shoreline, but Fort Severn’s foundations were supposedly still there, along with these underground facilities.

  The left-hand tunnel, on the other hand, branched back toward Bancroft Hall. If their runner was using it, this would be the one. The diagrams might not be that accurate, so there could be a tie into the basements.

  The Maglite threw bobbing shadows along the brick walls as he walked forward. The arched tunnel ceiling was barely an inch above his head, increasing the feeling that he was taking a walk in a burial vault. The air was musty, smelling of old lime. Tiny little avalanches of mortar dust trickled down from between the odd-shaped bricks in the side walls as his footfalls disturbed the silence. He shuddered when he realized the entire massive weight of Dahlgren Hall was pressing down on all this crumbling ancient brickwork right above his head.

  The floor appeared to be hard-packed dirt until he scuffed it with his toe and uncovered more brickwork under an inch-thick layer of white dust. Mortar dust, he realized. Good deal. The joints between all the bricks were recessed at least a quarter inch. He thought about testing one to see if it was loose, then thought better of doing that. Hate to find out I’m right, he thought. He kept tugging on the air line until he reached the first intersection, about two hundred feet from the alcove entrance. One tunnel went left and sloped down. The other, presumably the gun pit tunnel, went straight ahead and then branched left. He stopped fifteen feet back from the intersection, squatted down on his heels, and examined the dust.

  There were regular depressions in the fine dust. Not exactly footprints, but spaced at about the right intervals. He realized he should have come down here sooner. The mortar dust was the consistency of confectioners’ sugar, so it didn’t hold the definition of a footprint or the ridges of a sole or heel pattern. But the depressions in the dust were regular, about two feet apart. He put the Maglite down on the tunnel floor, but that didn’t help. Still no definition.

  Just then he heard a low, ominous rumble echoing down the tunnel, and his heart jumped. But then he recognized it: thunder. The storm must be overhead. As he worked to control his breathing, there came another clap of thunder, louder and more pronounced. He shone the light back down the tunnel. The tiny metal bands that bundled the air hose and the phone cable winked back at him through a fine mist of falling masonry dust. A third thump of thunder, and the mist thickened momentarily. He swallowed and wondered if he ought not to give this shit up right now. But there had been thunderstorms before, and the tunnels were still standing. He decided to go on.

  Then he realized that the intersection was actually a three-way junction. The left turn went down to the magazines. Straight ahead were the blocked-off gun pit tunnels. To the right was another oak door, smaller than the main entrance. He pushed on it, but it was locked. He tried the keys, and one worked the lock. This had to be the cross tunnel. He relocked it, turned around, and took the left turn down toward the magazines. The tunnel floor sloped down noticeably, and he wondered how far underground he was. He should be beyond the massive granite bulk of Dahlgren now, and approaching the right-hand edges of either the sixth or the eighth wing of Bancroft Hall. Or maybe even the tennis courts. He voted for the tennis courts. The air hose was getting much harder to pull, and he was tempted to leave it. The magazine doors were visible twenty feet away, framed by an arched alcove. It looked as if they were made of cast iron, not steel, with rivet heads visible in the harsh white light of the Maglite. There were wheels under the doors, and, based on iron semicircles embedded in the floor, they apparently swung outward against the alcove walls. He checked for more depressions in the dust, but they weren’t as obvious on the sloping floor of this tunnel.

  When he reached the doors themselves, he found the manometer to one side. It was a thin vertical glass tube about four feet long and an inch in diameter. It was supported by a bracket at each end, and there were tiny brass valves above and below the brackets. Small pipes led through the masonry at top and bottom so that the water level in the tube would always match the water level inside the magazine. And there was definitely water, right up near the top of the manometer.

  Okay, so much for that. Based on where the manometer was mounted, the magazine was flooded at least eight feet up from the bottom sill of the doors. So nobody could be in there. He’d have to ask the PWC manager if the water level varied, but it probably didn’t. The magazines were simply sealed underground chambers that had been abandoned for over a hundred years. Okay, then what were those depressions? Then it hit him: They said they inspected the tunnels every five years or so. Those were the footprints of the last inspection team. There had been nothing to disturb them once the men had backed out. Another rumble of thunder echoed down the tunnels. More mortar dust. He imagined he felt the earth itself shifting under his feet. Then the steel doors in front of him moved.

  Again he froze. Had he imagined it? He hadn’t actually seen them move, but he had heard them stir on their ancient iron rollers. A trick of the acoustics down here. He waited, and then remembered to breathe. He stared at the doors. Another boom of thunder, the sensation of movement, a slight pressure in his ears, and, yes, by God, the door moved. Less than a fraction of an inch. Air pressure. Somehow, the storm was modulating the air pressure down here, and the doors, being at the end of a tunnel, were being affected. While his logical brain worked that out, his lizard brain was beginning to sound a repeating refrain: Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go. Great damned idea, he thought, and, dropping the air hose, he started back up the tunnel.

  Another thump and boom from the storm up above, and the answering veil of mortar dust streamed out of the arched ceiling.

  I will not run. I will walk. If I run, my footfalls could disturb the brickwork even more.

  I will not run.

  But I can trot. Or do a fast shuffle, maybe?

  And he did, keeping his footfalls minimized, trying not to make any big vibrations, wiping the perspiration off his face and realizing it was gritty, fixing his eyes on the beam of white light ahead of him as he followed it back up to the intersection. He was terribly aware of the tunnel roof right above his head, and he stepped out and picked up the pace. Eighty feet from the entrance, he heard a crack from the brickwork, somewhere behind him. I will not run. I will not run.

  A moment later, he bounded up the steps past the two crewmen who were watching with knowing grins. A boom of thunder let go that sounded as if it had gone off down here in the main tunnel, but the sound was obviously just coming down from the various gratings in all its beautiful fury.

  “All done today?” the older of the PWC guys asked him as the other one began to crank on the reel of the air hose. “Look a little white ar
ound the gills.”

  Jim wiped his face and saw that his entire hand was white. “That thunder was starting to move shit around down there. Scared my ass.”

  “Yeah, it does that. Compresses the air. You were at the end of the pipe. It’s interesting shit.”

  “That’s one word for it,” Jim said, and all three laughed.

  “At least you didn’t rabbit. We had the PWC officer himself back there, Captain Johnson? Same thing happened. He damn near went over the crew’s backs to get out of there.”

  “Wasn’t like I didn’t want to,” Jim said. “I was afraid of making vibrations.”

  “You ought to try it when there’s a storm out on the bay and we get big waves. The waves hit the seawall out on Farragut Field. That’s all packed landfill, you know, rammed earth. Transmits the vibrations back into the Fort Severn foundations. That’s really interesting. Sure you don’t wanna go down this other tunnel?”

  Another boom of thunder bellowed down the concrete walls. “All the same to you,” said Jim, and the guy nodded. Jim asked if he could help with the cable reel, but they thanked him and said no. Then he asked why PWC didn’t just fill these death traps in.

  “Money,” the man said. “They shoulda done it a hundred years ago, but there you are. Army then, you know. Army does everything half-ass.”

  Jim thanked them again and headed for the surface, forcing himself to walk through the tunnel at a normal pace. When he reached the Stribling Walk access doors, he could hear rain streaming down the steps. There was a more pronounced gurgle under the steel deck plates out in the middle of the tunnel floor. He decided to wait it out.

  So what had he learned? That he was scared of underground chambers. Okay. But why had there been scratches on the lock, and why had they been covered up? His runner take a tour one night and have the same reaction? He should have gone down that other tunnel while it was open. He knew they wouldn’t open it again anytime soon. But there was just no way. When that huge damned door moved, it had taken all his self-control not to drop that air hose and just bolt.