Pitch-black. Midnight on the ocean. Negative on the hand in front of your face, too. I felt Scott's palm against my chest. “Hold it! I at least saw that we've got a flight of stairs here. Be careful,” Scott said.
I inched forward, found the step, and started down. Scott was on my right. With my left hand, I felt the cool brick wall. We had carefully clambered down twenty-five stairs when the door above swung open. The glow wasn't very bright, and we had been deprived of light for only a short while so our eyes didn't wince at the new light. It let us see enough to dash a few more steps to the bottom of what was a narrow set of stairs. An opening at the bottom turned abruptly to the left, and we found one more set of stairs.
In the shadowy light, with the sound of footsteps pounding behind us, we fled down again. At the bottom were two passageways, both opening into total blackness. I grabbed the sleeve of his shirt and pulled him toward the opening on the left.
No shouts or gunshots followed. I listened as we hurried along. I heard no sounds of pursuit. Perhaps they hadn't been close enough to see which way we took, and now they would be as blind as we were.
As the dim glow behind us rapidly dwindled, I slowed
slightly to breathe more easily. I didn't want to trip over something as the light failed.
“I don't know how much more of this I can take,” Scott said. His voice reverberated in the passage.
“Hush,” I said and needed to say no more. He'd heard the echo of his own voice as well as I.
We paced rapidly until the light behind us was the size of a pinprick. I held out a hand for Scott to stop. I slumped against the wall on my left and listened to the two of us breathe. Not another sound came from anywhere.
“Are they following us?” Scott asked.
I blinked back to where the last vestige of a gleam had been. I couldn't tell whether the pinprick of illumination swayed as a light would if carried by someone, or whether it was simply a light at the beginning of the tunnel.
“I don't know,” I said. I let myself pant for another minute, ears straining for any sound of movement behind us.
“Where are we?” Scott asked.
“Don't know.”
I heard his breathing begin to become more even.
Despite the rapidity of our progress and the fast-fading light, I managed to take some note of our temporary place of existence. The floor and walls of the passage we were in were cement. The floor was damp with frequent puddles of water that we plowed through. Each side curved to meet about a foot or so above our heads. Several sizes of pipe ran along the roof. We could walk or run side by side. Each outside elbow would scrape against a wall. The exact center of the tunnel gave us plenty of vertical room. Because we were moving side by side, our heads nearly scraped the sides of the excavation. The air felt cold and damp, but there was no wind.
“Awful dark,” Scott said.
“Unless they've got flashlights, it works against them and for us, I think.”
“Maybe they took the other turn,” Scott said. “I don't know if they saw which way we went.”
“If we're lucky, they didn't.”
My breathing wasn't back to normal yet, but I whispered, “I don't want to stop here any longer. I think we should keep going forward. This has got to lead somewhere.”
“I hope!” Scott said.
We pushed forward, and in a moment all vestige of possible light was gone. We tried to keep our footfalls silent, but I was still in my dress shoes and they clicked with what was probably a minor tap, but which after a time, I thought was firecracker loudness. Scott had dressed far more casually than I for the fund-raiser, which meant he'd worn chinos, a pale yellow shirt, blue blazer, and brown dress shoes. He still wore everything except the blazer.
Our steps became more hesitant as we went along. So far we hadn't run into any obstructions, but I had no idea whether sudden openings would gape in the floor, or whether we'd run into a flight of stairs. In a short while, we were slowly groping forward, with feet and fingers extended ahead and to the side of us. Careful as our movements were, we still managed occasionally to dislodge what I guessed to be small stones or pieces of wood. They echoed slightly, but we could hardly help running into them. So far no creepy critters or crawly insects had decided to make their presence known. The place smelled as if someone hadn't emptied their cat-litter box in years.
At one point, I tried counting the number of paces we took, but gave it up after a couple of hundred. Certainly we were traveling some distance. The tunnel seemed to go on straight. If we needed to go back, it wouldn't matter how far we walked. We could just turn around.
I couldn't see the face on my watch, so I don't know how long it was after I stopped counting when Scott said, “I'm scared.”
“Me, too,” I said.
We felt our way forward for a few more steps. Then Scott said, “I'm sorry about bringing Glen into the house. You
were right. He was into something awful. It's my fault we're in this.”
I wanted to say, “I told you so, and you should have listened,” but this was not the time. When we were safe again, I could indulge in my frustrations. I muttered a noncommittal “S'okay.”
If we decided to compare our insights or lack thereof about mutual acquaintances, although none of mine had gone this spectacularly wrong, Scott could remind me about our problem with the dwarf, the psychic, and the buffalo five years ago, when we encountered the above-mentioned at the height of the worst monsoon storm in Bombay in thirty years. All I had to do that day was agree to stay in the hotel room until afternoon. My insistence on going out had lead to a classic disaster. Memory could never blur the sheer terror of the events that followed; but, in my opinion, it hadn't been nearly as life threatening as this. At the present moment, I didn't want to stop and ask Scott's opinion of that escapade.
We fumbled onward for a time. Occasionally his right and my left arms, shoulders, or knees, bumped together. After one such movement, I felt Scott's hand slip into mine. I drew immense comfort from that closeness. I on the right, using my right arm, he on the left using his left, groped our way along the wall. Hand in hand we shuffled forward.
Our progress felt glacial, but although nothing sounded behind us, my tear began to grow. I'd never had trouble with claustrophobia before, but being this far underground, with fear behind us, and uncertainty ahead, I was upset big-time. Without Scott's presence, I don't know how I would have managed.
Scott said, “I think there's a light ahead.”
We stopped. “You're right,” I muttered.
Scott asked the obvious question. “What could it be?”
“I don't know, but we'd better be careful until we're sure.”
“They couldn't get ahead of us?” Scott asked.
“If they've got lights, they could, and if the opening we didn't take eventually led this way.”
It took several moments for the pinprick of light ahead to swell to the size of a baseball, but its glow barely penetrated to our position. It began to look like a miniature train-engine light bobbing in the distance. I halted for a moment; then my good sense chased away the irrational thought that it was a train. There were no rails under our feet, and any sound of thundering wheels would have echoed throughout the tunnel.
“Should we go back?” Scott whispered.
“We know for sure they're behind us somewhere,” I murmured. “We've got to try forward.”
Cupping my hands around my mouth and placing my lips against his ear, I explained to Scott how we needed to move. I felt his ear brush against my lips as he nodded that he understood. Each footfall now became a slow-motion quest for noiselessness. We raised each foot deliberately off the floor, moved it several inches farther down the hall, then placed it slowly into nothingness until it touched the concrete with less than a feather's murmur.
The gleam from in front of us had ceased to move. Perhaps my eyes had played tricks on me and the light had never moved, or maybe it was just my fears that had made it seem to bob and weave.
Around fifty feet from the source of the illumination, I touched Scott's shoulder. He stopped. I wanted to do a lot more observing and evaluating before moving closer.
What had seemed like the glow from a thousand-watt bulb, I now guessed must be the feeble glimmer from a rapidly fading flashlight. We heard voices, barely kept low.
“Are you sure we're ahead of them?” a baritone voice asked.
A tenor responded, “They don't have a light. They have to be moving carefully.”
“Maybe they just ran,” Baritone said. “They could be past us,” he insisted.
“Not possible. With a light we could move much faster and this was the first junction.”
“Maybe they found another junction somewhere on their side that led off in another direction. We had one.” Baritone's deep voice had an unattractive whine mixed in with it.
“I say we stay here,” Tenor said. “The other guys said they'd go back for more flashlights and follow the other passageway. If there's another turn, we'll get more men. Those two guys will be trapped between us and them.”
Obviously, we couldn't simply outwait them. Reinforcements would be coming, and we'd be stuck.
I could make out only the outlines of shadows leaning against the far wall. I could attach no face or feature to their floating voices.
“I don't like it,” Baritone said.
“You want to start going against my decisions?” Tenor voice asked.
Baritone added a bit of sullen to his whine, “No. I just don't like being this far underground and these tunnels flooded once before.”
Now I knew where we were.
On April 13, 1992, tons of water broke through the walls of the tunnel system that runs under Chicago's Loop. Water had gushed from the Chicago River into the basements and subbasements of hundreds of buildings. The water used the old tunnel system as a conduit for its flow.
The tunnels, built between 1899 and 1909, originally were a roadway for small electric trains making deliveriesâusually coalâto Loop buildings. The train company went bust in the 1950s, and then in the 1970s utility companies began using the tunnels instead of digging up city streets to lay cable. Most of the rails had been cemented over. The city planned to install bulkheads and steel doors to seal off tunnel sections under the river to prevent any further flooding, but in such a way as to let the advanced technology of the future still use the old system.
I remembered that there had been more than fifty miles of tunnels. The first shaft had been sunk in the basement of a saloon at 165 West Madison Street.
Concrete had been applied along the walls to give them a smooth, finished appearance. Generally the opening was 6'9” wide and 7'6” high. Our temporary refuge had been created out of the blue clay under the city decades ago. We must have been at or near the farthest terminus on the north side of the Chicago River.
I hesitated. The silence between the two of them deepened. I figured: better to try something sooner than later.
Baritone broke the silence abruptly. “You'd think those guys in the underground garage would have more than one stupid flashlight with crappy batteries. I hope they don't run out before the other guys get here. I don't want to wait in the darkness so they can jump us. Those two assholes are probably down here watching us. Why do we have to catch them, anyway? Let's just kill them and be done with it.”
“Why don't you shut up?” Tenor asked.
Baritone grumbled a little more, but basically did as requested.
At this point, I figured out why the flashlight didn't move or waver. They'd placed it on a small outcropping halfway up the wall.
While Baritone had been talking, I began lowering myself to a squatting position and slowly began to run my hand along the floor, hunting for an article to toss beyond them to distract them. An old trick, but if it worked, I wasn't going to worry about being saved by the cliche.
I hoped Scott didn't try to squat as I was. His knees tended to pop liked cracked knuckles. The kind of noise from a mile away that would start a herd of buffalo stampeding, much less alert our two antagonists in this situation.
I found nothing in the immediate vicinity of my shoes. I raised my foot and took one careful duck-walk forward.
Scott tapped my shoulder and almost unbalanced me. I looked up at him, but I could barely make out the gleam of his eyes. He pointed back the way we had come. A pinprick of light glowed in the distance.
I fumbled more quickly for some object to throw. Scott tapped my shoulder again. I wanted to shout, “What?”
He pointed to his other hand. I moved my eyes close and saw the faint gleam of several coins. Obviously, our minds had thought along the same lines, only his worked a bit more logically than mine at the moment. I felt stupid for not thinking of checking my pockets, but grateful that he had.