by D Haltinner
Darren sighed. “You’re right.”
“Now I don’t know what this is,” Jack said. “But I do have to say that it does seem to be in a spherical shape like you said. If it wasn’t for the lack of an appearance above ground, I’d have to agree with you.”
Darren stared at the void above him, shaking his head. “I don’t see how this could be separate from the one we saw before,” he said. “How could there be two of them?”
“We don’t even know what it is, let alone how many there might be,” Jack said. “If they indeed are separate.”
Darren reached up, letting his hand disappear into the blackness. “It sure seems like the same one,” he said. Darren lowered his arm and reached out to the darkness in front of him, pushing in all the way up to his elbow. “I can feel the corner back here.”
“That’s a good thing,” Jack said.
“Why’s that?” Darren said as he pulled his arm out.
“We know the void isn't eating away the world at least.”
“I never even figured it was,” Darren said.
“I didn’t know what else its purpose would be.”
“I do,” Audrey said.
Both males turned to look at her.
“What does darkness usually do?” she said.
Jack paused with his mouth open, jaw unhinged.
“I don’t follow you,” Darren said.
“When it’s dark,” Audrey said. “It prevents you from...”
Jack shook his head.
“From… seeing?” Darren asked.
“Exactly,” Audrey said. “Darkness prevents you from seeing, so if that’s the case...”
“The void is being used to hide something,” Darren said. A tightness enveloped his chest once the words came out of his mouth.
Audrey nodded, but her perma-smile was gone.
“You really think there’s something hiding back there?” Jack said. “Darren could feel the wall behind there.”
Audrey shrugged. “Of course I can’t prove it,” she said. “But if it is round, then I don’t think it would be a far guess to say that there’s something in the middle of it. Something that wasn’t meant to be seen.”
“And what would that be?” Jack asked.
“Why would I have any idea?”
“You seem to know so much about it.”
“None of us knows shit about it,” Audrey said.
Jack shrugged. “Just thought you knew something.”
“All I know is what we’ve seen, and so far, none of it makes any sense,” Audrey said.
“A tunnel below the campus, a black void that not even light can penetrate-possibly shaped into a sphere-and a room where someone might have been living sixty seven years ago. Does any of it fit together for you? Because so far, I’m lost.”
Audrey just shook her head and turned around, looking back toward the trench splitting the large tunnel in two.
“I suppose I was right,” Darren said, running his fingers across the surface of the void, feeling nothing but air.
“How so?” Audrey asked.
Darren pushed his hand in, wiggled it around, and pulled it back out, staring at it in front of himself. “We haven’t found a single answer,” he said. “We just run into more and more questions.”
“Eventually it will all make sense.”
“At this rate, I’m still not so sure.”
Audrey slipped a hand around Darren’s waist. “Don’t you want to find out what all this is?”
Darren put his arm around Audrey’s shoulders and pulled her into a hug. “More than anything.”
“Me too.”
“Can we get moving?” Jack yelled from beside the ditch. “Unless you two think there’s something else to be found in that corner, I’d like to get moving back to the other set of stairs.”
Audrey rolled her eyes, tipping her head back as she did so.
You ready?” Darren asked her. “It was the deal.”
“Yeah, but aren’t you glad we came this way?”
“I guess, yes. I’m leaving more confused than before, but we never would have known about this part of the void if it wasn’t for you.”
“There’s something so mysterious about it.”
“Just what you said, we can’t see into it.”
“It’s more than that. It’s just not... natural.”
“I suppose not.”
“Do you think someone made it?”
“How? This is probably beyond the ability of any physicist.”
“Are we going or not?” Jack yelled.
“We’ll be there in a minute,” Audrey yelled back.
Darren glanced back over his shoulder at Jack. “Start walking,” he said. “We’ll catch up in a moment.”
Jack grumbled something and began to walk across the ledge at the end of the trench and wandered back north on the other side.
Audrey let out a slow, relaxing sigh. “I wish we didn’t have him with us.”
“He did cut the door open,” Darren said.
“What, you can’t use a saw?”
“I can.”
“You’re just trying to justify his presence.”
Maybe she was right. He didn’t do much except try to take charge and tell them what to do. Perhaps Darren should have never told him about the hatch in the first place. “You’re probably right.”
“Then after this trip, let’s just part ways with him.”
“But he’s my roommate.”
“Please Darren. I can’t keep coming down here with him tagging along.”
Darren sighed, squeezing Audrey tighter.
“For me?” Audrey said.
“Fine,” Darren said. “After this trip, we won’t come down here with him again.” “You’ll talk to him?”
Darren nodded.
“Thank you.” Audrey pulled him in and kissed him. “I’m sure he’ll make his own trips down here, but do you think that he’ll be able to still keep it secret?”
“I hope so.”
“You’ll have to make him.”
“Make him?”
“Yeah, keep it a secret still. You can still talk to him about it, but I don’t want him coming down here with us again or with anyone else new.”
“I’ll take care of it,” he said.
Jack was going to get pissed off if Darren told him that they didn’t want him to come with them anymore. It wasn’t going to be pretty, but how else could he prevent Jack from tagging along except not telling him when Audrey and Darren decided to make a trip, and that was bound I catch up to them eventually.
Darren was going to have to handle his roommate in some way, because he couldn't let Audrey down. Audrey was the most important thing to enter his life, and he had to do everything in his power to make her happy. And if ditching his roommate was what it took, then so be it.
“Thank you,” Audrey said, stealing another kiss.
Darren didn’t know how, but he needed to make sure that Jack wasn’t going to tell anyone else about the tunnel. They couldn’t risk word getting out about what was down here. He wasn’t sure why keeping this place secret was so important, but it had to be done.
And Darren was the one to make sure it stayed quiet. At any cost.
Chapter 35
Jack was the first one to the top of the western steps, stopping across the tunnel as he waited for Darren and Audrey to catch up. “Feels better knowing you’re not thirty feet below ground, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah, but now we’re back to the coffin sized tunnels,” Darren said. “It felt so much less confining down there.”
“It did, but I’d rather know I have a chance of clawing my way to the surface in case it caved in.”
Darren stepped over the patched joint where the stairs attached to the tunnel and held out his hand to Audrey behind him. “I doubt it will cave in.”
“Me too, but I still like to know I have a chance,” Jack said.
Audrey stepped up into the unexplored str
etch of tunnel and shined her light down the north stretch, then the west. “Which way now?”
“We already know you want to go west, so we’ll go that way,” Jack said.
Audrey put on a fake smile. “Okay!”
Jack grumbled and started to walk way down the tunnel, leaving Darren shaking his head at Audrey.
“Just calm it down for today, please?” Darren said.
Audrey sighed. “Fine.” A pout fell across her face. “But I was just starting to have fun.”
“We’ll have fun later.”
“Promise?”
Darren nodded.
“Okay.” She held out her arm for Darren.
Darren took her arm and walked with her at his side down the west turn, a dozen feet behind Jack. “I wonder why this side of the street doesn’t go south?” he asked as they walked.
“There’s nothing that way,” Audrey said. “The last building on this side of the street is the T. Sommers Science building, but it’s not as far south as the theatre is on the other side.”
“I guess you’re right,” Darren said. “I bet this section of tunnel ends at the science building then.”
Audrey shrugged. “We’ll just have to turn around then.” Her hand floated to her stomach. “I’m starting to get hungry anyways. My tummy’s been grumbling for awhile.”
“I never heard it.”
“Sounds don’t travel too well down here, so I’m not surprised.”
“Yeah, I guess I’m not either. What time is it?”
“I don’t have a watch on me.”
“Me either.” He yelled up to Jack. “Have a watch?”
“In my backpack,” Jack yelled back, not turning around when he spoke.
“Can we see what time it is?”
“Yeah, sure. You in a hurry?”
“No, but we’ve been walking through these tunnels for awhile,” Darren said. “I think it’s getting later than we realize.”
“Fine,” Jack said. He stopped and shrugged the backpack off of his shoulders and set it on the floor, crouching down to it as he unzipped it and fished out a wrist watch from the bottom of it. “Two o’clock.”
“Already?” Audrey said.
Jack shook the watch and put it to his ear. “It still works, so unless it’s lying to us, it’s two o’clock. But I don’t think watches can lie.”
“Jeez, it doesn’t feel like it’s been that long,” Audrey said. “No wonder my stomach is complaining.”
“When do you have to work?”
“Four,” Jack said as he zipped his backpack and hefted it up to his shoulders as he stood.
“We may have to turn back soon,” Darren said. “It’s going to take us some time to walk back to the library down here.”
“I can skip work.”
“You wouldn’t get fired for that?”
“Probably.”
“You need your job.”
“Yeah, but I need this more.” He held up his arms to gesture to the tunnel around them. “This place holds more interest than money has so far.”
Audrey’s hand reached to the small of Darren’s back.
“With no money, you won’t be able to stay here,” Darren said.
“My dad would pay for everything,” Jack said.
“After knowing you lost your job for not showing up?”
“Well, maybe you do have a point.”
“Why don’t we just play this section of tunnel out to the end and then head back,” Darren said. “Time isn’t much of an issue for us, so we can always come back.”
“I guess.”
“Plus, we do have those pages to scan into the computer, and”-Darren looked to Audrey-“we do have a research paper we need to get started.”
“We can go back,” Jack said. “After we see what’s at the end of this stretch of tunnel. Even if it takes us another hour.”
Darren looked at Audrey, seeing if she would agree to Jack’s proposal.
She nodded.
“Alright,” Darren said. “Let’s get going.”
Jack adjusted a twisted strap on his backpack and started to walk into the darkness again, his pace a bit faster than before.
“You will still tell him we don’t want him around us anymore right?” Audrey asked, keeping her volume low enough that Darren had a hard time hearing her.
“I will,” Darren said. “And I’ll make it clear that no one can know about the tunnels.”
“No one,” Audrey said.
Darren nodded. “No one.”
Audrey pulled Darren’s sleeve until he bent over, and she kissed him on the cheek, leaving a spot of wetness that dried before he was able to straighten back up.
“Whoa, look at this!” Jack called from ahead.
Darren and Audrey rushed to catch up. The left wall had collapsed, spilling ragged chunks of concrete and mounds of black dirt across the tunnel’s width. A six foot wide section was opened into the earth, revealing roots of various sizes, including one large tree root that pushed into the tunnel’s air in a futile search for water.
Audrey gripped Darren’s arm tight. “Do you think it’s safe?”
“From the look of it,” Darren said. “I think that happened quite awhile ago.”
“And if I’m not mistaken,” Jack said, running his light across the broken concrete. “Those scratches in the concrete look like the teeth of a backhoe.”
“Someone got a little too close planting a tree,” Darren said.
“Looks like that,” Jack said.
“So you think it’s still safe?” Audrey asked as her flashlight beam drifted upward to the ceiling.
“Yeah,” Darren said. “It would have collapsed by now if it was going to.” He let his dim flashlight fall across the edges of the hole. “Plus, these walls are a lot thicker than I thought they’d be. That must have been one strong backhoe to do that.”
Audrey’s grip relaxed, and she scanned the ceiling with her own light, focusing on the cracks that spidered out from the gap.
“Ready to keep moving?” Jack said, sounding impatient.
“I’m set,” Darren said, looking over to Audrey for her response.
“We can go,” she said.
Jack stepped around the chunks of concrete and dirt and started moving west again. Darren and Audrey followed right behind him, Darren holding Audrey’s hand as she pranced between the rubble with her other arm held straight out like a kid on a balance beam.
They left the destruction behind and continued into the dark monotony westward. Darren’s flashlight was growing dim enough to become worthless, but he intended to get every ounce of juice out of the batteries as he could, so that way he would be able to make it that much longer before he used up the next set. Jack wasn’t the most sharing person, so it was a bit amazing in its own right that he even bought the flashlight itself-it still didn’t surprise him that the guy bought the cheapest lights he could find.
“We should be under the science building by now,” Audrey said a minute later.
“I wonder if there’ll be a hatch,” Darren said.
“I’d be surprised if there wasn’t one,” Audrey said.
“We have seen one in each building so far, haven’t we?”
“Sometimes two.”
They walked for another minute until Jack stopped ahead of them, looking straight up above him.
“What is it?” Darren asked as they approached behind him.
“End of the line,” Jack said. “The tunnel ended, but there’s a hatch above us.”
“You sound disappointed,” Darren said.
“Of course I am. I was hoping for more than just a dead end.”
Darren’s dim light cast a glow on the back wall. He couldn’t see more than a pale gray wall, even when Jack joined his flashlight beam with Darren’s. Audrey kept her light on the floor in front of her feet, not moving it to explore the dead end like Darren would have expected. Her light was as bright and strong as it was always was, and all she was u
sing it for was to create a circle on the concrete floor.
“I suppose we’ll have to turn back now,” Jack said. “But when we come back first thing in the morning, I assume we’ll be able to take the north path. Any objections?”
Darren looked at Audrey, but she stood motionless. “Yeah, fine,” Darren said. “We’ll discuss it tonight.”
“Sounds fine,” Jack said. His flashlight dimmed out into non existence, and after hitting the side of it a couple of times, the orange glow came back, doing little to light the area.
Audrey stepped out of the way as Jack took his position at the lead, then waited for Darren as Jack continued to walk away from them.
“Ready?” Darren said, offering his arm to her.
Audrey wrapped her hand around his elbow, and walked with Darren far enough behind Jack that they could only see his silhouette in the dim light of his flashlight.
“There’s something back there,” Audrey said.
“Back where?”
“At the end of the tunnel.”
“What do you mean? I didn’t see anything.”
“Your flashlights were too dim to notice it, but one of the walls had a door on it.”
“A door? What are you talking about?”
“A door, you know what that is.”
“Like the steel one?”
“No, this one looked like it was made to blend in.”
“How could we have missed that?”
“Your flashlights were too dim. I saw it with mine.”
“Why didn’t you say something before, when we were there?”
“I didn’t want Jack to know about it.”
Darren nodded. “Ahh, now I understand.”
“I figured we could take a closer look by ourselves,” Audrey said. “It’s our own secret, and he doesn’t have to know about it.”
“That’s fine by me.”
“We can go back and look at it?”
“Tomorrow, yeah. I won’t tell him anything about it. I promise.”
Audrey pulled him closer. “It’s a good thing neither of you swapped out the batteries in your flashlights,” she said. “You both would have noticed it for sure then.”
“I’m still surprised we missed it.”