“Somebody installed a new lock?”
“I think so.”
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t know. Could mean somebody knows I’ve been here. Could mean the janitor found some kids in the basement and decided it was time for new hardware.”
“Is there a janitor?”
He shrugged.
She said, “But somebody must own the building. It’s a matter of record, right? You could look it up at City Hall.”
“I suppose so.” It hadn’t occurred to him. “Might be dangerous. This isn’t a Nancy Drew mystery. I don’t think we should draw attention to ourselves.”
“If we don’t open that door,” Joyce pointed out, “you can never go home again.”
“If we do open it, maybe they’ll put in a better lock next time. Or post a guard.” This was a chilling thought and he couldn’t help looking past her, through the cracked glass of the outer door. But the street was empty.
“Maybe we can open it without being too obvious,” Joyce said.
“We shouldn’t even try. We should get the fuck out of here.”
“Hey, no! I’m not backing out now.” Her grip on his hand tightened. “If this is true … I want to see.”
Tom looked at the lock more closely. Cheap lock. He took out his Visa card and slipped it between the door and the jamb. This worked on television but apparently not in real life; the card bumped into the bolt but failed to move it. “Give me your keys,” he said.
Joyce handed him her key ring.
He tried several of the keys until he found one that slid into the lock. By twisting it until it caught some of the tumblers he was able to edge the bolt fractionally inward; then he forced the card up until the door sprang open an inch.
A gust of cool, dank air spilled through the opening.
He felt the change in Joyce as they descended. She had been cocky and reckless, daring him on; now she was silent, both hands clamped on his arm.
In the first sub-basement he tugged the cord attached to the naked forty-watt bulb overhead—it cast a cheerless pale circle across the floor. “We should have brought a flashlight.”
“We probably should have brought an elephant gun. It’s scary down here.” She frowned at him. “This is real, isn’t it?”
“As real as it gets.”
The second lock, on the wooden door in the lowest sub-basement, had also been replaced. Joyce lit a series of matches while Tom examined the mechanism. Whoever had installed the lock had been in a hurry; the padlock was new and sturdy but the hasp was not. It was attached with three wood screws to the framing of the door; Tom levered the screws out with the edge of a dime and put them in his pocket.
Down into darkness.
They climbed over rubble. Joyce continued striking matches until Tom told her to stop; the fight was too feeble to be useful and he was worried about the flammable debris underfoot. She let the last match flicker out but flinched when the darkness closed over them. She said, “Are you sure—?
But then they were in the tunnel itself. A sourceless light illuminated the slow, precise curve of the walls ahead.
Joyce took a few steps forward. Tom hung back.
“It’s really all true,” she said. “My God, Tom! We could walk into the future, couldn’t we? Just stroll a few decades down the road.” She faced him. “Will you take me sometime?” Her cheeks were flushed. She looked fragile and feverish against these blunt white walls.
“I don’t know if I can promise that. We’re playing with something dangerous and we don’t know how it works. I can’t guarantee we’re safe even just standing here. Maybe we’re exposed to radiation. Maybe the air is toxic.”
“None of that stopped you from coming here.”
But that was before, Tom thought. When I had nothing to lose.
She touched the walls—smooth, slightly resilient, utterly seamless. “I wonder who built it? Haven’t you thought about it?”
“Often,” he said. “It must have been here at least ten years. Maybe longer.” Maybe since the Indians occupied Manhattan. Maybe since Wouter van Twiller operated the Bossen Bouwerie in this district. Maybe Wouter had had a tunnel under his cowshed hereabouts. Maybe he knew it and maybe he didn’t.
“People from the future,” Joyce said. “Or Martians or something like that. It’s like a ‘Twilight Zone’ episode, isn’t it?” She drew a line in the dust with the point of her shoe. “How come it’s broken at this end?”
“I don’t know.”
She said, “Maybe it was hijacked.”
He blinked at the idea. Joyce went on, “The people who are supposed to use it aren’t here. So somebody used it who wasn’t supposed to … maybe fixed it so nobody could find him.”
Tom considered it. “I suppose that’s possible.”
“There must be other tunnels. Otherwise it doesn’t make sense. So maybe this one used to be connected somewhere— a junction. But somebody hijacked it, somebody sealed it off.”
This was plausible; he couldn’t formulate a better explanation. “But we don’t really know.”
“Hey,” she said. “Nancy Drew is on the case.”
Maybe, Tom thought, this would turn out all right. He had convinced her to turn around and go back—but then the strange thing happened.
Joyce saw it first.
“Look,” she said. “Tom? What is that?”
He turned where she was pointing, already afraid.
What he saw was only a vague blur of luminescence against the uniform brightness of the tunnel, far away. He thought at first it might be some malfunction of the lights. Then Joyce squeezed his hand. “It’s moving,” she said.
Slowly but perceptibly, it was. It was moving toward them.
He guessed it might be a hundred yards away—maybe more.
He turned back to the rubble at the near end of the tunnel. They had wandered maybe thirty feet from it. Sprinting distance, Tom thought.
Joyce repeated, “What is that?” There was only a tremor of uncertainty in her voice—she wasn’t frightened yet.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Tom said. “Maybe we should get out while we can.”
What he felt was not quite awe, not yet fear. The luminescence was bright and had taken on the suggestion of a shape. Tom hustled Joyce toward the exit, aware that he was in the presence of something he didn’t understand, something akin to the tunnel itself: strange, powerful, beyond his comprehension.
This was the tunnel under the world, where demons and angels lived.
He paused at the place where the broken brick and old lathing and plaster had collapsed, because it was impossible to resist the urge to turn and look. Joyce did the same.
But the phenomenon had moved much faster than he’d guessed. It was almost on top of them.
He drew a breath, stepped back instinctively—and caught his heel on a brick, and fell. Joyce said, “Tom!” and tried to drag him up. The creature hovered over them both.
Tom couldn’t find a word for the thing suspended in the air above him, almost close enough now to touch. Briefly, his fear was crowded out by a kind of abject wonder.
The shape of the apparition was indistinct—blurred at the edges—but approximately human.
Later, Tom reviewed his memory of the event and tried to reconstruct the creature in his mind. If you took a map of the human nervous system, he thought, modeled it in blue neon and surrounded it with a halo of opalescent light—that might come close.
It was translucent but not ghostly. There was no mistaking its physical presence. He felt the heat of it on his face. Joyce crouched beside him.