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.
The creature had stopped moving. It was watching them, he thought—perhaps with the two opaque spots which occupied the position of eyes; perhaps in some other fashion.
This was terrifying—bearable only because the creature was utterly motionless.
Tom counted silently to ten, then backed up the piled rubble an inch or so.
The creature’s attention followed him. But only that.
Joyce looked at him. He could tell by the grip of her hand that she was deeply frightened but still in control. He whispered, “Back up slowly. If it moves, stand still.”
He didn’t doubt the creature’s immense power; he felt it all around him, felt it in the radiant heat on his exposed skin.
Joyce nodded tightly and they began to inch up the rubble and out of the tunnel. It occurred to Tom that this was the instinctive response to a dangerous large animal, no doubt wildly inappropriate here. He stared into the creature’s eyespots and knew—absolutely wordlessly—that its interest in them was intense but momentary; that it could kill them if it wished; that it hadn’t decided yet. This wasn’t the random indecision of an animal but something much more focused, more intimate. A judgment.
Gazing into that pale blankness, he felt naked and small.
They had almost reached the welcome darkness of the basement when the creature vanished.
Later, he argued with Joyce about the way it had disappeared. Tom maintained that it simply blinked out of existence; Joyce said it had turned sideways in some way she couldn’t describe—“Turned some corner we couldn’t see.”
They agreed that its absence was as sudden, absolute, and soundless as its appearance.
Joyce scrambled through the dark basement, pulling Tom up the stairs. He felt her trembling. This is my fault, he thought.
He made her wait while he put the hasp of the lock back on the wooden door. He fumbled in his pocket for the three screws and the dime to drive them with, sank the first two home and then dropped the last. Joyce said, “Christ, Tom!” —but held a match in one unsteady hand while he groped on his knees. The screw had rolled under the edge of the door and for one sinking moment he thought he’d have to pry off the hasp a second time to get the last screw back, which would be next to impossible in this dark bad-smelling basement full of who-knows-what-kind-of-impossible-monsters— but then he caught the head of the screw with his fingernail and managed to retrieve it.
He was as meticulous as his shaking hands would allow. He didn’t want anyone to know he’d been here—though maybe that was impossible. But the idea of one more barrier between himself and the tunnel, no matter how flimsy, was reassuring.
He tightened the last screw and pocketed the dime. They climbed the stairs toward the lobby, Joyce leading now.
He pictured the top door, the one he’d opened with a credit card and Joyce’s key. A terrifying thought: what if it had slipped shut? What if the bolt had slammed home and he couldn’t open it again?
Then he saw the crack of light from the lobby, saw Joyce groping for the door, saw it open; and they tumbled out together, unsteady in the light, holding each other.
Twelve
Billy’s nerves were steadier by the time he got home, and for two days after that he resisted his urgent need for the armor.