He plugged it in one evening and asked what was at the other end of the tunnel in the basement—what he would find if he went there, destruction, the machine replied. The answer was chilling and it prompted Tom to ask, “For me? You mean I would be destroyed?”
THE TERMINAL HAS BEEN DESTROYED
NOT YOU
ALTHOUGH THAT POSSIBILITY EXISTS
The tunnel continued to occupy his thoughts. He guessed it was inevitable that he would reopen that passage, enter it, follow its distant curve. He had been postponing the act, fearing it—but wanting it, too, with a ferocity that was sometimes alarming. It had gone past curiosity. Buying this house had been the beginning of a tide of events which wouldn’t be complete until he followed the tunnel as far as it would take him.
But that was frightening, and this razor-thin balance of fear and obsession kept him out of the basement—postponing what he couldn’t resist.
His dreams had ceased to beg for help … but when he came home Friday night and found the clock radio on his bedside table pronouncing the words “Help us, Tom Winter” in the voice of a popular Seattle AM radio announcer, he yanked the appliance’s wall cord and went looking for his crowbar. He had waited too long already. It was time to live out this peculiar dream his life had become, to ride it down to its conclusion.
He opened the healed wallboard. A line of machine bugs sat watching him from the lid of the automatic dryer, with wide, blank eyes and no perceptible expression. He supposed he only imagined their patient, grim disapproval of what he was doing.
Events began to happen quickly then.
Within the next week, he made three separate journeys down the tunnel.
The first—that night—was exploratory. His doubts came flooding back when he saw the tunnel again, as its illumination flowed around him. He took a few tentative steps into its luminous white space, then stopped and looked back. Here was the frame wall of his basement standing exposed and absurd, as if it had interrupted this continuous flow of space almost by accident—as incongruous as Dorothy’s farmhouse in Munchkinland. (But the tunnel couldn’t have been here when the house was erected, could it? The contractors would have had a word or two to say.) The tunnel itself was broadly rectangular; its walls were smooth and warm to the touch; the air felt pleasant and not at all stale. He took a tentative step, then began to walk with more confidence. The floor was faintly elastic and gave back no echo of his footsteps. Every few yards, Tom turned and tried to gauge the distance he had come.
By his own estimate he had traveled several hundred yards —well under the Post Road hill and presumably deep in the earth—when the curve of the tunnel was finally great enough to hide any glimpse of home. As strange as that sight had been, it had also been a comfort. He stood a moment while fresh uncertainties crowded his mind. “Fucking crazy place to be,” he said aloud—expecting an echo; but the tunnel absorbed the sound. There was nothing in either direction now but this bland curve of wall.
He walked on. He had no way to measure the angle of the tunnel’s ellipse, but the curve was remorseless—he could swear in fact, that he had turned a full 180 degrees. He should have carried a compass … but he had a notion that a compass might not work here; that its needle would swing wildly, or perhaps point consistently forward. The idea was spooky and he thought again about turning back. He was way out of his depth in this pale, featureless artery. A cold sweat began to bead out on his forehead. He was taking tiny silent cat-steps, straining to hear any sound ahead of him—the fear setting in again, with a strong rider of claustrophobia. The tunnel was a few feet higher than his head with as much as a yard’s clearance on each side: not much room to turn around. And nowhere to run, except that long circle back.
But then the curve eased ahead of him and within a couple of minutes he saw what appeared to be the end of the line: a gray obstructing mass rendered obscure by distance. He picked up his pace a little.
The wall, when he reached it, was not a wall but a ruin. It was a tumble of masonry, concrete blocks and dust spilling over the pristine white floor. There seemed to be no way through.
DESTRUCTION, the machine bugs had said.
But not, at least, recent destruction. This collapse had scattered dust in a broad fan across the tunnel floor—Tom’s runners left distinct prints in it—the only prints, he was relieved to note. Nothing had come this way for a long time. Not since the DESTRUCTION.
Experimentally—and still with that prickly sensation of playing at the feet of a sleeping giant—he pulled away a chunk of concrete from the collapse. A haze of dust rose up; new rubble trickled in to fill the vacancy. Some of this was the stuff of which the tunnel itself was made; but some of it appeared to be commonplace concrete block.
And on the other side—what?
Another basement? Somebody else’s basement? He might be as far away as Wyndham Lane or even the shopping center near the bypass. He checked his watch and thought, I could have come that far in forty-five minutes. But he suspected—well, fuck it, he pretty much knew—that this tunnel didn’t lead to the storeroom under the Safeway. You don’t build a tunnel like this unless you have a destination somewhat more exotic than Belltower, Washington.
Gnomeland, maybe. The pits of Moria. Some inner circle of heaven or hell.
Tom pulled away another fragment of brick and listened to the dusty trickle behind it. No way through … although he felt, or imagined he felt, a whisper of cooler and wetter air through the tangle of masonry.
Speculation was beside the point: he knew what he had to do.
He had to leave here, to begin with. He was tired, he was thirsty—he hadn’t had the foresight to bring so much as a can of Coke. He would have to leave, and sleep; and when he was ready he would have to come back. He would have to bring a picnic lunch, which he would pack in a knapsack along with some tools—his trusty crowbar—and maybe one of those paper masks they sell in paint stores, to keep the dust out of his nose.
Then he would pick and pry at this obstruction until he found out what was behind it—and God help him if it was something bad.
Which was possible, because something bad had definitely happened here: some DESTRUCTION. But the matter had passed beyond curiosity. He had clasped both hands around the tiger’s tail and braced himself for the ride.
He came back the next day fully equipped.
Tom decided he must look more than a little strange, hiking down this luminous mineshaft with his prybar and thermos bottle and his sack of ham-and-cheese sandwiches, like one of the dwarfs in Disney’s Snow White. Of course, there was no one to see him. With the front door locked, the house a mile away, and this end of the tunnel securely barricaded, he was about as alone as it was possible to get. He could take off his clothes and sing an aria from Fidelio if the spirit so moved him, and no one would be the wiser.
After three hours of dirty, sweaty work he managed to open a gap between the piled rubble and the abraded ceiling of the tunnel. The space was approximately as large as his fist and when he aimed the flashlight into it the beam disclosed a mass of vacant, cool air. He could see dust motes moving in the light; and farther on he could distinguish what appeared to be a cinderblock wall … but he couldn’t be certain. He forced himself to stop and sit down with a sandwich and a plastic thermos-top of coffee. The coffee was gritty with dust.
He ticked off the discoveries he had made. One, this tunnel had a destination. Two, that destination had been violently closed. Three, there was nothing on the other side waiting to jump him—nothing obvious, anyhow.
All this would have been much more frightening except for his conviction that whatever happened here had happened long ago. How many years since the last tenant had vanished from the house on the Post Road? Almost ten—if what Archer had told him was true. A decade. And that felt about right. Ten years of dust on this floor. Ten quiet years.