The Tunnel of Hugsy Goode (21 page)

"She might be in the kitchen washing dishes," said Tornid.

We tapped the ceiling of the tunnel with our shillelaghs. Maybe she would say, "What's that?" Drop a piece of china, maybe ... make John Ives rant. Or, maybe she was down in the cellar, closer still to us, ironing. Well, we had no way of knowing, there being no drain down here to serve as a hot line between above and below.

We didn't have much time ... it was now eight o'clock ... and we should have gone on down Passageway J.I. right then. But wondering about whether Jane Ives had heard us or not, and wondering about the moms, whether they had heard our voices on the mini or not, made us hurry back to the Throne of Hugsy the Goode. Just plain curiosity.

Maybe on top they were all listening to what the lost mini tape recorder was saying. They must have figured out by now that me and Tornid's voices were on it. The
grils
must be saying, "We told you so. They did steal it!" Yechh! Not true. Used it? Yes. Stolen it? No. Besides, out of our paper-collecting money we would pay them for part of a new tape. They better not erase our voices from the tape. We had to preserve them for the under-alley archives.

Back at the throne, there was Minny (we decided to call the tape recorder Minny now, as though she were one of the
grils
) going along very nicely. "Coming, Mother," etc. After my "Whatdya want!" she stopped.

We listened. No sound from above. We couldn't tell whether anyone had heard or not. Maybe they were so mystified, they were struck dumb. Then ... a voice. Tornid's mom. "It bugs me, Latona (my mom's name). I know that was Tornid's voice I heard. But where are they? And what's this business about 'Mother'? Tornid must be sick, calling me 'Mother,' not 'Mommy.'"

Then Beowulf (another one of Tornid's mom's nicknames) gave her piercing whistle that involves no fingers. A boy she knew in high school once, on the team, had taught her how to whistle that way ... no fingers involved, just teeth and lips and tongue. Tornid can do it, too.

"You whistle, too," I said to Tornid.

Tornid whistled ... very well, too, considering we were in tunnel atmosphere.

"Did you hear that?" exclaimed Tornid's mom.

Everybody up top was so excited, we had little trouble hearing them.

Then my mom, she whistled, the way she does ... puts two fingers in the corners of her mouth ... loud. It's enough to break your eardrums. Then she blew a blast on the cow horn. Then silence, as they listened. Then Jane Ives ... she'd joined the gathering at the drain ... said, "Funny. I thought I heard them just now. They must be somewhere around. You don't think...?" And then she was silent.

We trust Jane Ives. She is the only one besides Tornid and me who knows about our maps and plans. So far she doesn't know we've been down, though. Still, the incredible truth might be dawning on her. We don't think she will tell them her hunch until we say to ... not unless we never come back, of course. And you can see that, to a grownup, to have the tunnel be real and not imagined would be hard to take in, even for Jane. But anyway, Tornid and me had to get on with the expedition before they did get wise.

Meanwhile, we had been adjusting Minny, and now we started her off at the very beginning again, so she should run quite a while and continue baffling the upper world.

Then back into the glooming we went as fast as we could to the J.I. entrance. "They might," I said, "if they have any sense, send Sasha out on a find-Tornid expedition, give her one of your old sneakers to get your scent real good and tell her, 'Find Tornid, Sash! Good dog, Sash!'"

About to turn the corner into the narrow J.I. passageway, I flashed my light back to the Throne of Hugsy the Goode for one last look at it, at Minny, and maybe Racky, our only ties to the upper Alley, for who could tell where this small tunnel might go? My flashlight is a good one, but fifty paces is far. I did see the chair all right, though dimly, and dimly I saw...

"Tornid. Get inside the J.I. passageway," I whispered. "Quick! Did you see what I saw?"

"Ye-ah, who was it?" asked Tornid, shaking.

Someone was sitting in the Throne of Hugsy the Goode! And we heard words, not the words of the mini tape, not the voices on the mini tape, a hoarse voice too far away to be distinct. Was the voice saying, "Get out of here!" or, "Get
me
out of here?" Quite a difference! We didn't wait to find out. We hurried down the J.I. passageway into the unknown. We could not go back by way of the chair. Now we
had
to go where the tunnel went, wherever that was.

"Who
was
that?" asked Tornid. "The skeleton-maker?"

"Sh-sh-sh," I said. "Save your breath. You may need it. And anyway, I don't know. Cripes! Why didn't we stay where it was nice and safe on top and wait for the ice-cream man?"

It seemed as though we had been going through this narrow passageway for miles. We might turn up under the Navy Yard, or even the East River. This narrow tunnel might lead right straight to a dumping place where people who had been murdered could be slid into the river and never be heard of again.

That skeleton leg might have been part of a whole man, once intended for the river, and only the main part of him made it there. Yechh!

I was scared to turn my flashlight on behind us. At least we didn't
hear
anything or anybody coming creeping along behind us, hadn't so far anyway, and I muttered, "
Courage, mon ami.
"

The words gave Tornid courage. He said, "This is not as scary as the tunnel in the Funny House where you were
always
coming on things ... not just one bone and one man."

"Maybe he's a phantom," I said. "If we can't get out this way and
have
to go out that way, we'll chalk our faces up real scary, say weird sounds, teab ti, teab ti, hit him with our shillelaghs..."

All of a sudden we came to a slight bend in this tunnel. We had been coming west and now it was N.W. And suddenly we came upon a great wooden door! Cripes! It might be the door to the slide to the river, the dumping slide. We listened. No sound of water.

"There's a sign on the door," I said. "If it was a door leading to Davy Jones's locker, they wouldn't have labeled it."

The sign was old and tarnished brass. I spit on it and I made out the words:
MEMORIAL HALL
. "It says," I told Tornid, "Memorial Hall."

"Memorial Hall!" said Tornid. "Oh, now I get it ... here's where we find the skeletons ... maybe more than forty. Like 'Temple of the Dead' in olden days. Funny. Our trip on the Myrtle Avenue El ended up in a cemetery. And now this trip is ending in a temple of the dead."

"Cripes, Tornid," I said. "Don't you even know what Memorial Hall is ... at Grandby College? It's the hall where we go to see plays and old movies, lots of things the students put on."

"Oh,
that
Memorial Hall!" said Tornid.

"Yeah, but how to get in," I said, "before that guy on the chair gets wise to the fact that we may be slipping from his clutches, his plans—whatever they are."

Then I remembered the long and rusty key. "Hold my flashlight," I said to Tornid. I got the key out of my gunny sack. It fitted in the lock. But both the lock and the key were so rusty, I couldn't turn it. My hands were trembling. I was nervous about that guy or phantom last seen sitting on Hugsy Goode's chair. He might have dropped the key in the rubble beside
TRATS
on purpose for us to find. He might have seen us pick it up ... he probably has eyes that pierce the darkness ... and anyway he could have seen us and our flashlights disappearing in the J.I. passageway.

"See if you can turn it," I said to Tornid.

While he was trying, I got my screwdriver, nail file, and jackknife out of my gunny sack. Tornid couldn't turn the key. I took it and scraped away some of the rust from it and from the lock.

"Spit on them both," I said to Tornid. "Because of your ESP, you may also have powerful spit."

Tornid didn't have much spit because he was scared, but he spit all he had. Then I put the key back in the lock. Slowly, it got to turn a little. Then it turned all the way. I turned the heavy knob, and the door creaked open toward us. Then, with a groan it suddenly swung wide open, as though someone inside had given it a push and said, "Come on in."

I flashed my light around, and there wasn't anyone there that we could see. But we were in a large passageway now, as wide as the main under-alley one. I took the key out of the lock, but I didn't lock the door in case we had to go back this way in a hurry, guy or no guy on the throne. On the wall I wrote, "To J.I.," with an arrow pointing behind us.

Key safe in my pocket, we closed the door and went on. I felt the walls. The wall on our left was warm. "Feel this wall," I said to Tornid, and he did.

"Hot," he said.

"Right, Torny, old boy, old boy," I said. "That's because on the other side of this wall is the Engine Room, where, at this very minute Orville Nagle may be polishing his old steam whistles, getting them to work for Commencement Day, or petting his stray cats. Yes, Torny, old boy, old boy. We are now in the lower depths of Grandby College. We have come through the under alley, through the J.I. passageway that's so long it stretched under Story Street, under the Engineering Building, under part of the Mall to here—Memorial Hall!"

I felt like an archaeologist discovering a site.

We went as fast as we could down this wider passage, stopping only once in a while to draw an arrow on the wall and a giant footstep on the floor, the way the students do on the sidewalk in Library Park on Founders' Day. And then—we came to another door. So we were going somewhere. "Where's this one to?" I asked.

"I dunno," said Tornid. "We didn't come to these on the maps."

"Nope," I said. "We have to make additions when we get back."

The same key fitted this heavy door, and the lock was not as rusty. Tornid had accumulated some more spit, and I said, "Spit your powerful spit."

He did. The key turned easily and the door opened. I put the key back in my pocket.

"Keep your foot in the door," I told Tornid. "There's no sign here. And you know you always have to keep your escape route open."

Tornid did.

We went in. We took a look around. We didn't need our flashlights here. A dim electric light bulb dangled from the ceiling and lighted the scene.

"Guess where we are, Torny, old boy, old boy?" I said. "Not the river..."

"Not the chute for sliding in the dead..." said Tornid.

"Not Mike's art store..."I said. "Come on ... guess. The li..."I was giving him a clue.

"Uh ... the-e-ah ... library?" he asked.

"Righto," I said.

"Who's that over there?" whispered Tornid, pointing into the shadows. "Sitting on that box?"

We ducked behind a crate of books and waited.

My heart sank. If that guy sitting on the Throne of Hugsy the Goode had eyes that could pierce darkness, he probably had a way of getting here ahead of us ... by a crawling-through, not discovered by us yet, type of passageway where the smoogmen are. For a minute Tornid and me crouched low behind our crate, and we didn't look out. Then I figured that if he was the guy on the throne, he could see us through the wooden box anyway, so I stood up. Now he could see the top part of me with his plain eyes and the lower part with his see-through-solid eyes. I looked at the guy over my nonshatterable eyeglasses. He was asleep! Or pretending.

I studied him a second. Then I saw who it was—a man named Tweedy who rakes leaves on the campus and closes up the library at night. He'd come down here for a little snooze, probably, before ten when the library would close. He half opened his teary eyes when I told Tornid who he was, and he closed them immediately. Not interested, or maybe he thought he was dreaming.

So here we were then, unscathed, in the basement of the library of Grandby College. By way of tunnel, through darkness and dangers, known and unknown, we had landed ourselves in an old familiar haunt. How did we recognize it? Because we've been down here. The librarian, Mr. Amos B. Belcher, a friend of my dad's, gives us permission on rainy days to come down here to look at old
Popular Mechanics
so we can draw pictures of old cars and make models of them when we get home. There they were now, on a shelf, dusty and tied up in batches of twelve.

We have sat here, right close to this very door we have just come through that leads from tunnel to tunnel and back to the Alley and to our beginning, T.N.F.,
TRATS,
and the hidey hole. That was before we had the sense to take in the importance of the words of Hugsy Goode—that there might be an alley under the Alley just like the one on top. But now, we have proven that Hugsy Goode was right and deserves having the tunnel named after him, and the chair. Maybe someday he'll come back and visit and have a chance to sit in it. If he ever does come back and if that guy Tornid and me saw sitting in the chair was not a mirage and is still sitting in it, Hugsy can say to him, "Don't sit in that chair, it's mine. And I go to college."