by D Haltinner
“It blended in pretty good. I only happened to notice the hinge sticking out of the wall at first.”
“I wonder what’s behind it.”
“It might be another room like the one we already found.”
“Maybe, but there’s only one way to find out.” Darren leaned over and kissed her forehead. “Tomorrow, we’ll have a little adventure of our own.”
“I can’t wait.”
Chapter 36
Darren approached the door to Audrey’s dorm, papers in hand, bundled into his jacket as best he could to protect himself from the growing wind. Audrey was standing just inside the door in a thin gray sweatshirt that was pulled tight around her shoulders as she bunched up the sleeves in her fists. Her hair was tied back again, straight and tight across her scalp, turning into a mass of mahogany waves as it spilled out of her hair tie.
Audrey pushed the door open when Darren reached it. “You must be freezing,” she said. “I’m cold just standing by the door.”
“It’s worth a little discomfort to see you,” he said as the door shut behind him.
“I can’t argue with that,” Audrey said. She reached up and kissed Darren. “Come on.”
Audrey took Darren’s hand without removing her own from the sleeve of her sweatshirt. She led Darren down the hall and to the stairs, dragging him up the silent stairwell, then to the door of her room.
“It’s awfully quiet here tonight,” Darren said. The sound of a TV across the wall echoed down the corridor, but there were no other signs of life.
Audrey slipped her ID card out of her tight jeans and flashed it at the reader beside her door. “Those who stayed for the weekend are off doing things.” The door unlocked and she pushed it open. “It is date night after all.”
Darren followed Audrey inside. “Does a study date count?”
“It does to me.”
The door closed shut and Darren set his papers down on Audrey’s roommate’s desk. “Who is your roommate anyways?”
“Her name’s Nelle, she’s in our history class.”
Darren shrugged. “That doesn’t help.”
“She’ll be back in tomorrow. I’ll introduce you to her then.”
Audrey let most of her fingers poke out of the sleeves of her sweatshirt. “Do you want to work on the paper first, or those sheets we found?”
“Do you really have to ask?”
Audrey’s eyes fell to the papers Darren set on the desk. “I suppose not.” She moved to her desk and pushed her own chair in front of her roommate’s computer. “Have a seat. Want a soda?”
“I’m fine,” Darren said. He took his jacket off and hung it around the back of the proffered chair before taking a seat in it.
Audrey stepped past Darren, her hip swinging in front of Darren’s eyes. Even in the sweatshirt, Darren could see the gentle curves of her hips as they flared out from her waist. He wanted to rest his hands on the top of her hips, pull her close. She already had her hair up, so that wouldn’t be in the way when he started to kiss the sides of her neck.
Is that why she had it tied up already? Did she want him to become passionate with her tonight? She did say that she would have let him if he wanted, was she hoping that he would take her up on that offer?
The sweat started to grow in his armpits. He hadn’t been thinking about sex when he came over here, he had the tunnel and those papers they found clogging his brain. Was she expecting him to take her up on that offer tonight? As if he was too nervous to even think about acting on it now. What if he’s too nervous to get it up? That had happened the first time he had sex with Rachel-she had to coax it up.
Darren shook his head. Just get sex off the mind. If it happens, it happens. Just go with the flow, maybe she has too much on her mind to be interested tonight anyways.
Yeah, right.
Audrey settled into her roommate’s chair and turned the laptop on. “I don’t think her scanner will have any problems trying to enhance the writing on these papers,” she said. “I’ve seen her use it on an old faded photograph, so if it can do that, it can do simple writing.”
“Probably.”
Audrey stretched out her shoulders, pushing her breasts out against the front of her shirt until their entire shape was visible to Darren. She let out a yawn as Darren pried his eyes off of her.
He needed to get his mind under control.
The computer finished booting and Audrey opened the software for the scanner. “Should we scan them all in and then try to enhance them, or do them just one at a time?”
“How about one at a time,” Darren said.
“Kay, give me the first one.”
Darren handed her the first page, and she opened the lid of the scanner and slid the paper inside, putting the faint writing face down’’.
“Let’s see what this baby can do,” Audrey said as she clicked a button on screen. With a light hum, a bright light worked its way across the scanner, seeping out at its seam. At the same time the piece of paper materialized on the computer screen from top down.
“I should be able to darken it up pretty easily,” Audrey said as she began to adjust the contrast and brightness settings of the image on screen. Words began to form as she tried to darken it without affecting the white of the paper, and after a moment of trying different settings, the image cleared on screen.
“A map?” Darren said
“It’s an old hand drawn map of the campus,” Audrey said. She pointed to a square on the screen. “It’s still faint, but there’s Rosch Hall,” she moved her finger down. “And the theatre.”
“Looks like a few buildings are missing,” Darren said. “Those might be all the original buildings.”
“Look here,” Audrey said, pointing to faint writing in the lower corner. “Let me see if I can darken it a bit more.”
Audrey adjusted some of the settings and the words became clearer.
“Nineteen forty four,” Audrey said. “These papers must really be that old.”
“You didn’t believe they were?”
Audrey shrugged. “I don’t know. That just seems so long ago.”
“Hence why it’s so faded.”
“But those sheets I found with the math problems all over them, they weren’t faded.”
“Different paper? Different ink? Maybe these got wet at some point?”
“I suppose.”
Audrey ran her finger over the screen of the laptop, pausing at each square building to read its faded name tag. Her finger crossed over a dull line and kept going, but Darren leaned forward to see the line closer.
“Is that what I think it is?” Darren said.
“What?”
“That line you passed over.”
“Where?”
Darren pointed to it. “Can you clear it up any better?”
Audrey adjusted the controls again, and a series of lines connecting the campus buildings appeared.
“Oh my God,” Audrey said.
“It’s the tunnels,” Darren said. “Someone mapped out the tunnels.”
Audrey followed the lines with her fingers. She started at the library, followed it down to the theatre and then over to the Science building.
“Someone went through a lot of trouble to make this,” Darren said.
“Yeah, and look at this,” she pointed to the place the funnel ended beneath the T. Sommers Sciences building. “The door I told you about.”
“It opens to a room.”
“A big room. Look at it. It covers almost half of the science building.”
“What the hell’s in there?”
“I don’t know,” Audrey said. “But you said tomorrow we could find out.”
“We will.”
“Without Jack.”
Darren nodded. “Without Jack.”
“Did you talk to him yet?”
Darren sighed. “I didn’t have chance before he went to work.”
“But you will tonight?”
“I promise.”
>
Audrey’s hand fell away from the screen. “How can all this be below our feet, and no one knows about it?”
“We do,” Darren said. “Whoever made this map did.”
“But still, it’s not even hidden that well.”
“The faculty seems to do a good job of keeping the hatches protected.”
“Why don’t they just block off the hatches for good?” Audrey said. “There doesn’t seem to be any purpose to the tunnels.”
“That we know about.”
“Yeah, but we also know that no one’s been down there in years, just by the dust on the floor. The faculty doesn’t use it, so why keep it in one piece?”
“I have no idea.”
“It doesn’t make any sense.”
“Does anything about it make sense?”
“Not really.”
Audrey let out a sigh and leaned back in her chair. “Just look at it. It covers the entire campus.”
“At least what the campus used to be like sixty seven years ago.”
“It goes all the way to the gym, and where the old dormitories used to be. It covers the whole thing.”
Darren nodded. “I wonder if it still does.”
“Can we find out?” Audrey asked, looking over to Darren.
“I would like to.”
Audrey’s smile grew. “That’s a lot of walking.”
“No more than a normal day of class.”
“I guess.” She leaned forward and clicked around the screen. “I printed a couple of copies on the printer over in the study room. I’ll go grab them and be right back.”
“Kay.”
Audrey got up and slid her way past Darren again, stepping out into the hallway and disappearing from view. Darren kept his eyes on the computer screen as she squeezed past her head, and now he continued to follow the lines of the map with his eyes.
At the far north corner, where the old dorms used to be-which was now the parking lot for the students staying on campus-was what looked like another small room. It was hard to tell for sure with the faint lines on the screen, but it appeared to be a room half the size of the one they already broke into earlier in the day.
Would it still be there now? Probably, but what Darren really wondered was if the tunnel stretching from the library north to that room still existed. The dining hall and dorms were built after this map was made, but if they went through the trouble to build a new tunnel beneath the road, wouldn’t they do that for the corner of campus too?
How could they build that large tunnel beneath the road without all the students around asking what it was? They would have had to dig all the way down thirty feet to build it.
Excuses are easy to come up with. Installing new plumbing. Running a large storm drain across town, below the street. Fiber optics for the new computer networks. They could have told the students anything, and they would have bought it.
But why go through all that trouble to maintain it?
The door opened, and Audrey came back in with the printouts in her hands. “Look at this,” she said as she handed it to Darren.
“The lines came out much better than they did on the computer,” Darren said, looking at the solid lines where the faded ones were shown onscreen.
“And look at where we found the void.”
Darren looked, but he wasn’t sure what he was seeing. “What is it?”
“The tunnel doesn’t end there, after the theatre.”
“What?”
“It keeps going. Off campus.”
“How far?”
Audrey slid past Darren and set herself into the chair. “Off the map.”
“What’s out that way?”
“Now it’s just a bunch of houses, but I don’t know what it was in the forties.”
“Me either, but I bet it was empty.”
“That would be my guess.”
“You think the tunnel still goes that far?”
“Only one way to find out.”
“There’s no way to find out.”
“Why’s that?”
“I’m not going into that void. That thing creeps me out,” Darren said. “And with that noise coming from down that way, I don’t even want to get close to it.”
“We’ll never find out how far it goes,” Audrey said.
“Not as long as that void is there, we won’t. We wouldn’t be able to even see if we went in there.”
“True.”
Darren set the paper down on the desk. “I could have been right too.”
“About what?”
“Remember how our voices echoed in the void?”
“Yeah.”
“What if it is some sort of cave, or some sort of pit?” Darren said. “That would explain why whoever made this map ended the tunnel’s drawing like that.”
“I suppose.”
“Whoever made this map might have been able to see the pit, but they had no way of drawing it, so they just let the tunnel end-open like that.”
“It would make sense.”
“With that black wall blocking the path, I don’t think we can risk trying to find out. We might just end up falling into some pit, dying for simple curiosity.”
“We should send Jack in to find out.”
“We aren’t risking anyone’s life”
“But there has to be something back there. Even if it is a pit, why would the tunnel connect to it?”
Darren shook his head. “I have no idea.”
“Think we could strap a camera to an RC car, and send that it?”
“Maybe, but if we can’t see through it, why would a camera?”
Audrey shook her head. “I don’t know, but there’s something back there.”
“My ears told me that when we were there.”
“But there’s something more than that. I can feel it,” she said, patting her chest. “There’s something important back there, and I think it’s the key to it all.”
“That may be, but we can’t start risking lives to find out.”
“I know. I just wish there was some way.”
“Me too.”
“We’ll think of some way.”
“We’ll try to. But for now, you’ll have to focus your curiosity on the places we can reach.”
“Like the door I saw,” Audrey said with a sigh. “I want to know what’s in every inch of that tunnel, but it takes too long.”
“It’s a lot of area to cover.”
“At least we have a map to follow now.”
Darren nodded. “We’ll cover the entire tunnel, but I don’t think we’ll be able to do it in two days,” he said. “Just be patient, and we’ll figure out what’s going on.”
“You make it sound so simple.”
Darren shrugged a single shoulder. “I know we’ll figure it all out. We just need more time."
“But if that math problem is any indicator, we don’t have a whole lot of time left.”
Chapter 37
“What do you mean?” Darren asked.
“I don’t think it’s a simple coincidence that the date on that paper is only a few days away. I think there’s some sort of importance to that date.”
“But someone wrote that decades ago.”
“They knew something we don’t,” Audrey said. “And I’m afraid if we don’t figure it out soon, it’s going to be too late.”
“Is that why you’ve been so antsy?”
Audrey shrugged. “Yeah, I guess so,” she said. “My insides are telling me to hurry it up and figure out what’s going on. Don’t yours?”
“A little I guess,” Darren said. “It’s hard to get that place out of my mind, but I don’t feel as rushed as you seem to be.”
“You don’t think there is something significant about Tuesday?”
“Well, there must be if someone spent so much time on that problem, but without having any idea of what it is, I don’t feel as pressured as you seem to be.”
Audrey gestured to the pile of peppers they found
in the room below. “Those might contain something to explain it.”
“They might.”
“Then let’s get to work, shall we?”
“We are running out of time if you’re right.”
Audrey slid out the drawn map from the scanner, and slid in the next page from the stack, starting the process of scanning and enhancing the image.
What if Audrey was right about the date? What if whoever did all that math knew that something was going to happen on that date, sixty seven years later?
Right, a modern day Nostradamus.
There might be something significant about the date, but that doesn’t mean something’s going to happen, or that it will be too late, as Audrey put it. Maybe it’s a simple prediction of the next big snow storm, or the next migration of some locust-type animal. The date might not have anything to do with the tunnels, and it was only a coincidence that it was found down there. Someone obviously spent a lot of time down there, so they could have had things down there that had no relation to the tunnels.
But Darren knew that wasn’t true. Like Audrey said, he could feel she was right. Simple instinct, but it was true. He rarely listened to his instinct, trying to use reason to tell him most things, but reason had been falling down on the job the last few days. He had ignored his instinct for so long, that he wasn’t even sure what he felt was that versus indigestion, but there was some sort of feeling inside of him in regards to the tunnel.
“That one isn’t coming out too well,” Audrey said, trying to adjust the picture. “It may be too far gone to do anything with.”
Darren took the next paper off the stack and held it out to Audrey. “Let’s not waste too much time on it if it is, there’s a number of pages to get through.”
Audrey took the new page and slipped it into the scanner. “I hope they’re not all that bad.”
“One out of two isn’t too bad.”
“So far. We might end up with one out of-how many are there? Ten.”
Darren looked through the pages, one at a time. “This one looks like it’s in pretty good shape,” he said, pulling it out of the stack.
“Let me see what I can get out of this one first.”
Audrey scanned in the next sheet and spent a minute trying to adjust the settings.
“This one isn’t coming out too well either,” she said. She pointed to an area of the image where there were a series of faint lines. “I think that’s writing, but I don’t think I can clean it up enough to read.”