The Box

by Brian Harmon

  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 blush, 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 watched 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.”

  Chapter 7

  The tunnels beneath Briar Hills weren’t like the sewers on television. Although he knew that Briar Hills in no way required the vast subterranean systems that New York City warranted, he nonetheless had pictured the wide, gloomy corridors with rounded ceilings that were so often depicted on television. What he found instead were confined, concrete passageways, many of them too short to allow them to walk without stooping. Shortly after their descent from the second passage, they were forced to continue on hands and knees beneath massive bundles of cables.

  There was water everywhere. A perpetual dampness permeated the concrete around them, so that soon the knees of their jeans were soaked through. Shallow pools of standing water stretched along the floor in many of the tunnels, and the hollow echo of dripping water was as common as the shadows.

  But nothing down here was constant, not even the sounds. At times there was a strumming of machinery echoing around them and at other times the tunnels were silent as tombs. Several times they were startled by strange noises they knew was the natural gurgling of water through some machine or some other harmless thing, perhaps even the simple flushing of a toilet somewhere above them, but which sounded like the gargling moans of something unearthly in the shadows. And several times there were skittering, scuffling noises that very likely did belong to something alive and hungry (but almost certainly small and harmless).

  At one point they stepped out into a large, open tunnel with an enormous pipe running along the center of the floor. Here the machinery was the loudest and the temperature the hottest. But there were lights in this tunnel, and the floor was dry for a change. It was a welcome passage while they traveled it, but too soon the map told them to exit into a passage on the right and they found themselves in another damp corridor that took them to another rusty ladder that waited to take them deeper into the darkness.

  From here, the floors became muddier, the walls slimier, and soon it became apparent to Albert that they were no longer in the university steam tunnels. It had been some time since they saw or heard any kind of machinery and the overall feel of the tunnels was different now. They found long stretches of round, concrete passages with few intersections. A few times they heard cars passing somewhere overhead and once they heard voices drifting from drainage grates in an adjoining tunnel, but for the most part they felt completely isolated from the world above them.

  The worst part about these newer tunnels was the cobwebs. These rarely used passages were a haven for spiders of all types. Ghostly white curtains wavered at their approach, casting odd shadows across the walls. At times it looked to Albert like a city of pale silk, as if the tiny creatures had discovered a place private enough to build a metropolis. Invisible, gossamer strands licked their faces and clung to their clothes as they passed, and several times Brandy cried out in revulsion as one of the arachnid inhabitants of the silken city danced across the exposed skin of her face or hands.

  “These tunnels just go on forever,” Brandy observed.

  Albert nodded agreement. “I know. This city’s not that big. It seems like overkill.” The steam tunnels he’d expected. He was sure they snaked beneath the entire campus, perhaps for many miles, reaching as far as the river, and even several levels deep. But it felt to him that they’d already traveled enough tunnels to stretch from one end of the city to the other and back again. He’d begun to wonder if the entire city followed the university’s example, tying together the courthouse and the police station or the library and post office, perhaps networking the entirety of the city’s public buildings. But much of what they saw contained no equipment of any kind. It had even been a while since he last saw any cables or pipes. And yet, the labyrinth-like system didn’t seem like a very efficient sewer system. He would have thought that most of the tunnels would point east, toward the Mississippi River, but they seemed to go every which way. The tunnel they were in now didn’t look like it had ever held water. He wondered if some of these tunnels were a flood-prevention system of some kind, perhaps designed to carry large amounts of water past the city in the event that the mighty river overflowed its banks, as it was certainly k
nown to do.

  “I’ve always heard rumors about old tunnels under the city.”

  Albert glanced at her, curious.

  “There’re supposed to be miles and miles of them. Real old. Some people say they’re haunted.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. There’s lots of stories. Witches and voodoo. That sort of thing. Some people say that the city’s founders were into witchcraft. Used to scare the shit out of me when I was a girl.” She was looking around, uneasy at the thought. “I haven’t thought about those stories in ages. I figured they were all made up.”

  “Sometimes there’s truth behind myths.”

  “Yeah. I heard a friend of my parents tell them once that some of the tunnels were older than the city itself. He said no one knows how they got there.” She chuckled softly. “Daddy always said he was full of shit.”

  Albert smiled. “Sometimes stories like that are comforting. Some people have a hard time believing that there aren’t any more mysteries left in the world. I guess I’m one of them.”

  Brandy looked at him and smiled. “That’s kind of romantic.”

  “Is it?”

  “Yeah.” She turned and looked down the dark tunnel ahead. “But right now I’d rather not believe that there are secret tunnels built by centuries-old witches, if you don’t mind.”

  Albert laughed. “Of course. I won’t bring it up again. But you have to promise to tell me more about those stories when we get out of here.”

  “It’s a deal.” She smiled at him and he felt a sort of warmth flow from her. He couldn’t help but wonder what she was thinking.

  They turned right and found a set of concrete steps descending deeper into the earth. At the bottom was another iron gate, this one different from those back in the university steam tunnels. Instead of a chain, it was secured by a simple latch and a place for a padlock. There was no lock present, however, and the gate stood ajar, as though waiting for them. Beyond the gate was a small room. There were a number of discarded soda cans and an old furnace filter lying among a scattering of cigarette butts, yellow insulation shreds and twisted strips of rusty metal. There were holes in the walls varying in size from one to eight inches in diameter, suggesting that there used to be pipes running through this room, perhaps even a heating system of some kind. Directly across from them was a heavy door with no handle.