Catacombs

by Mary Anna Evans

  When she heard the denim of Cully’s jeans creak as he stepped forward, ready to press on, she thought of Stacy and knew that quitting wasn’t an option. She kept going.

  They passed into a second large room, longer than it was wide and lined on both sides by sleeping rooms. A single doorway, again, stood in the center of the far wall. Footprints crossed the center of this room, too, from door to door. Some of them were headed in the direction they were moving, and some of them came back.

  The ceiling over their heads was lower than a standard eight-foot ceiling, but it wasn’t oppressively low. Faye, at five-feet-nothing, didn’t even have to stoop. Cully was already stooping to support the backpack, so the ceiling cleared his head easily, but she doubted that he would have been able to stand straight.

  By reaching her hand overhead, Faye followed the electrical conduit pipe for the length of the room. Her fingertips found one old ceramic fitting after another. Each of these had held a single bulb needed to bring light underground. How much light had those bulbs been able to throw? Had the space been dimly lit, or could people see well enough to live comfortably? She couldn’t say.

  Again, they moved down the right side wall from door to door, looking into small sleeping chambers where Stacy wasn’t. Faye’s hope was fading.

  * * *

  “Is this where you hid when you ran away?”

  They stood looking into one of the sleeping chambers. Cully had led her to each of the others, saving this one for last. Or perhaps steeling his resolve to look into a portal into his difficult past.

  “Yep.”

  “You and Angela?”

  Cully didn’t say a word to answer her. He had moved behind her like a shadow as they explored the sleeping chambers, creeping from doorway to doorway and hoping desperately that Stacy was alive in one of them.

  Each room seemed barely large enough for a single sleeper or, at most, a couple, but Faye knew she was seeing them from the perspective of a middle-class person in the twenty-first century. The people who had built this amazing space had probably considered each compartment to be suitable for a family, big enough for two adults and several children to sleep in, with enough extra space for a few possessions. Faye felt along the sides and top of a door opening and found a hole on either side, probably to hang curtains for privacy.

  The back wall of each room was dirt, and no one had bothered to face the dirt walls with brick or wood or plaster. The side walls were lightweight wooden partitions. These were handmade caves. Many of them featured several rectangular niches carved into the dirt wall, and Faye pictured people storing possessions there. Some dishes in this niche, perhaps, and a few carefully folded articles of clothing in the next one. Maybe even a book, rare and treasured.

  Each sleeping room was clean of everything but dust. There were no blankets or beds, and no artifacts of daily life like plates and cups.

  The absence of artifacts was not a surprise. In an odd way, it meshed perfectly with the oral history that she had heard. For a group of people so poor and so persecuted that it made sense to move to safe quarters underground, it would have been unforgivably wasteful to leave anything behind. People desperate enough to dig their own caves did not have spare blankets or spare plates or even spare chopsticks. When the time came to pack up and leave this place, they had packed up literally everything and moved on.

  Except for an oil stove, cast iron and lonely, that had been seen by visitors in 1969 but not since, as far as Faye knew.

  Faye looked into this last chamber, the one where Cully and Angela had hidden, trying to imagine the lively sounds of families filling this space as they lived their lives. She couldn’t do it.

  “I feel like I’m in a tomb,” she said. “Or a womb.”

  Cully didn’t answer. His flashlight was trained on the chamber’s walls and he stared into the emptiness, so rapt that the hand holding the gun was drifting slowly where it would be no defense against the kidnapper they feared.

  She glanced back. Cully looked like a gunfighter from a Western movie, old and washed-up but too afraid of old enemies to lay down his gun.

  “Would you look at that?” he asked, waving the flashlight at the far wall. Instead of carved niches, this earthen wall had been devoted to beauty.

  Someone had taken a sharp stick and scratched a picture on it, covering the entire area from floor to ceiling, six feet high and six feet wide. It was a landscape scene with mountains, trees, and a flowing stream, and it put Faye in the shoes of someone who wished very much for a view of the outdoors. No, not just the outdoors. This scene was made by someone who wanted to be home.

  Faye didn’t know what China looked like, but she thought that maybe this was it.

  “Whoever did that was an artist,” she said.

  “My grandfather did it.”

  Faye turned her face to his, but he didn’t look at her.

  “My mother brought me here when I was a kid, so I could see where she lived. I knew he made this as soon as I saw it, even before she told me. Some of his drawings hung on our walls when I was a kid, and they looked a lot like this.”

  Faye leaned farther into the room and saw that another landscape was sketched in pencil on the wallboard that separated this chamber from the one on her right. It showed rolling hills flecked with wide-spaced trees and divided by a river. “This one’s very different, but China’s a big place. There’s got to be a lot of different landscapes there.”

  “No, that’s Oklahoma. I made that one, after Angela…after she was gone. While I was waiting for her, eating the last of my food and deciding what to do next.”

  He turned without another word and led her toward the big room’s far door. As Faye neared it, she felt herself shrinking from it reflexively. Was it going to fall on her like the last one did?

  She felt its hinges and found that they were made of roughly wrought iron, perhaps made by someone who never wanted a door to fall on him again. She turned her attention to the latch and found that it was locked. The lock felt oddly slick and shiny. It felt new.

  “Put some light on this.”

  He did, and the modern padlock gleamed silver in her hand.

  The hand holding the flashlight was trembling. “See, Faye? I told you I knew where Stacy was.” Cully eased his backpack to the floor and pulled out something with two long, metallic handles.

  He tossed the gun at her and she caught it in both hands. Then she laughed out loud, because it was plastic. He grinned sheepishly, then he elbowed her aside and set to work with a pair of bolt cutters that might just be large enough to cut through the padlock’s shank.

  * * *

  The padlock put up quite a fight, since the bolt cutters were undersized for the job, but Cully insisted that he could handle it.

  “I bought the biggest backpack I could find, and then I bought the biggest bolt cutters that would fit in it. The bigger the bolt cutters, the easier they cut. Not to mention that little ones can only get their blades around a skinny piece of metal. It’s not like I could get a forty-two-incher down here, but I did the best I could in the little bit of time I had.”

  Faye busied herself by talking to Stacy, who she believed must be on the other side of the old door. There might be other reasons for it to be padlocked, but she couldn’t think of any of them.

  “Stacy! Can you hear me? It’s Faye. I’m here with Cully Mantooth and we’ve come to get you out.” Faye repeated this reassuring message time and again, but she never heard a sound on the other side of the door. All the while, Cully was working the blades of the bolt cutters around the padlock’s shank and grunting as he strained to squeeze the handles together.

  At last, she heard the sound of tortured metal being sheared in two. Soon, the same sound came again and she saw the padlock come away from the door in two pieces. Panting, Cully held the pieces on his palm and glowered at them until Faye
gently edged him aside and shoved the door open.

  Faye braced herself for what she might find on the other side of the door, then she and Cully walked into a bottled-up past.

  The room was a near-twin of the painted room that Faye had studied so closely. She had enough of a sense of Lonnie’s style and color palette to believe that he had painted both rooms. The colors and the loose, flowing brushstrokes were the same.

  A battery-powered camping lantern stood in the center of the room, casting a dim light that didn’t quite reach its corners. There were no benches around the walls, just a single chair with a footstool and side table nearby, all of them wooden and simply made. The side table’s surface was covered with water rings. Faye imagined the artist—Lonnie, she supposed—sitting in the chair at the end of a painting session, kicking back with a beer and studying his work.

  Today, though, it was not Lonnie sitting in the chair. It was Stacy Wong.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  “Sitting” wasn’t exactly the right word for what Stacy was doing. She was slumped unconscious in the chair with her head lolling to one side. Her feet were propped on the footstool and her arms dangled limp with her fingers brushing the ground. Only the chair’s wooden armrests digging deep in her armpits and the chain around her waist kept her from tumbling onto the floor. The chain was looped through a metal hook protruding from the brick wall, stout and strong enough to hold a heavy bucket back in the days when people had lived in these catacombs. Faye could see that Stacy was taking long, deep breaths, so at least she was alive.

  A large bruise on Stacy’s forehead was blue-black, shading toward green, and blood was matted in her hair. More bruises covered her hands and arms, and this made Faye wonder what bruises lurked under her clothes.

  A clear plastic clamshell container holding half of a ham sandwich was on Stacy’s lap, resting neatly on a dark blue napkin. An open single-serving carton of milk was in the process of adding a square to the water rings to the side table’s surface. Thank God somebody was feeding her, although Faye wasn’t sure Stacy had actually eaten anything in the ten or more hours since she’d disappeared. Maybe she’d only been given half of a sandwich.

  Faye reached out and touched the milk carton. It was half-empty, so at least Stacy had been drinking. The waxy cardboard was still slightly cool, so she and Cully must have just missed the person feeding Stacy. Since this was presumably the person imprisoning her, the thought made Faye jittery. However, this probably meant that it would be a while before that person returned, probably hours. She and Cully had time to figure out what to do.

  Cully dropped to his knees and took one of Stacy’s hands in his. “Are you okay, sweetie? Stacy. I need you to open your eyes.”

  Stacy opened one eye, looked at him, and sighed. Then she opened the other.

  “Well, that’s something,” he said. He took Faye’s hand and put Stacy’s hand in it. “You take over here. I gotta do something.”

  “Can you talk, Stacy? Can you tell us what happened?”

  Stacy opened her mouth and said, “I was—” and her voice drifted off. She tried again and managed to say, “Tried to—” Then she seemed to give up, unwilling or unable to do anything but focus a brilliant smile on Faye.

  Now Faye was worried about whether they should move her. She studied the cut on Stacy’s head. It was long, but it wasn’t too deep. There was a small lump beside it, but nothing dramatic. Only her behavior made Faye fear brain damage. Stacy was rolling her head from side to side without apparent pain, making this examination more difficult than it needed to be, so maybe her neck was okay.

  Faye saw that Cully was still holding the bolt cutters as he walked to the metal door in the room’s back wall.

  “This’ll be a lot easier to take care of than that other lock,” he said as he examined it.

  Faye saw that the lock was attached to a hasp that was little more than a flimsy loop of corroded metal. A sturdy pair of tin snips could have cut right through it. Rather than cut through the shank of the lock itself, Cully easily snipped the hasp but left it in place. The padlock hung on to what was left of it, but it was useless to stop the door from opening.

  “That’s in case we need to use the back door in a hurry,” he said. “Even if we can get out the way we came, we might need to come back. The person who put Stacy here might not think to check and make sure that the lock’s still in one piece.”

  “It’s always good to have options.”

  “Yep. Besides, a smart man never lets himself get penned up in a box canyon.”

  “Whatever you say. We’re going to have a hard time getting her out of here if she doesn’t perk up, though. It seems like a bad idea to leave her alone and I doubt we have any cell reception down here.”

  He checked his phone and said, “Nope.” Then he tossed Faye’s loaner phone at her and asked, “You?”

  “Nope.”

  He knelt next to Stacy and said, “Don’t worry, sweetie, we’ll get you out of here.” Then he set to work hacking through her chains with a pair of bolt cutters that were barely big enough for the job. They did the trick.

  Next, he started pawing around in his backpack, looking for something.

  “How did you know Stacy was here, and why couldn’t you just tell the FBI or the police and let them find her?” she demanded.

  He ignored her.

  “Because now we have to try to get her out of here with no help,” she said. “Or else one of us is going to have to sit here with her while the other one goes for help, and that doesn’t seem like a good plan, because the person who chained her up will be coming back. I’m thinking we have a couple of hours at most, presuming Stacy is getting regular meals. So what’s going on with you, Cully?”

  Cully stopped ignoring her, which was progress. He nodded his head several times. “Good questions. Those are all good questions. I can answer them. And I will answer them. Most of them, anyway.” But he didn’t. He just kept shuffling through his backpack.

  “Can you move your right hand, Stacy?” Faye asked. The left hand twitched, but then the right one opened and shut. Stacy might be disoriented enough to be confused about right and left, but she could hear, think, and act. Faye was relieved. “What about your right hand? Right foot? Left foot?” Stacy’s movements were awkward, but she followed all of the instructions.

  Faye squatted on her heels and eased Stacy into an unsupported sitting position, then she watched her sit up, wavering but unaided.

  “While you’re answering questions…or not…here’s one more,” she said to Cully. “What kind of secret is so important that you’re willing to go up against somebody who did this,” she cut her eyes toward the semi-conscious Stacy, “carrying nothing but a toy gun?”

  He chuckled. “You knew that gun wasn’t real the whole time.”

  Stacy’s back was still off the chair. She was unsteady, but her trunk muscles were firing. Maybe they could move her after all.

  “I actually didn’t, not until you threw it at me. But now we’re in some decent light and I can see that it’s a toy. Cully, who did you plan to fool if you had to pull that thing in broad daylight?”

  “I’m an actor. You’d be surprised at how easy it is to fool people. If you act scary, they get scared.”

  “There’s no waiting period to buy a gun in Oklahoma. You couldn’t take a taxi to the nearest Walmart and buy a real gun?”

  “If I was an Oklahoma resident, yeah. I could’ve been in and out of Walmart with my gun in an hour. But I’m not. So I skipped lunch and took a taxi someplace where I could get the other things I needed really fast.”

  “The flashlight and the bolt cutters?”

  “Yep.”

  “The backpack and those fashionable clothes? And shoes? And a toy gun?”

  “Yep. And this.” He pulled a bottle of water and a box of cheese-and-crackers out
of the pack. “Stacy, honey, you need to wake up and eat.”

  Faye opened the water bottle, dampened her hand, and smoothed it over Stacy’s face. Maybe the coolness would rouse her.

  “Cully, seriously. Tell me what’s going on. Why did you decide you needed to be the Lone Ranger? You could have had the help of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, plus all of their technology, training, and firepower. What part of that sounded like a bad idea?”

  Cully rested a paternal hand on Stacy’s head. “I didn’t know she was missing until I heard people talking after I had my first little interview with your beloved Federal Bureau of Investigation—who I don’t trust as far as I could throw them and their firepower. I knew I had to do something, because I had a decent idea that I could find her. And you see that I was right. It took me a while to assemble what I needed to find her, but I did it.”

  “I think I understand why you thought you could find her. You knew the underground passageways because of your mother—”

  “Yeah, we used to come down here all the time. We’d explore and she’d tell me stories about when she was a kid. I could probably have gotten here from that staircase at the Gershwin, but the FBI’s had it cordoned off while they do their CSI thing. Besides, I wasn’t sure about what the bomb might have done. Maybe some of the passageways over there caved in after the blast.”

  Faye held the crackers to Stacy’s lips. The woman stirred but would not eat. Faye tried the bottle of water and got the same response.

  “Where are we?” she asked.

  “Pretty dang close to the old part of the Gershwin, actually. See that metal door?”

  “Yeah, it’s like the one in the other painted room.”

  “Well, it opens into the same storm sewer line, only about fifty feet above the other one.”

  Faye remembered her trip through that sewer. She had been so happy to see the other door that it hadn’t occurred to her to ask whether it was the only one. She asked it now.