by R. T. Lowe
You’re chasing after a ghost, you idiot, he told himself as she flew past a stone building with large stained glass windows and an old weathered cross above the entrance. She abruptly changed direction, turning north, and then she disappeared. Felix raced past a noticeboard on the other side of a low wrought iron railing that said ST. ROSE CHAPEL and some other things he couldn’t read because the letters were small and his head was bobbing wildly up and down.
He turned the corner and saw a flash of blue vanishing into the ground. At the end of a long bed of withering flowers that bordered the church, he came upon stairs leading down to a heavy oak and iron door. It stood slightly ajar. Left open for him. He didn’t hesitate. He scampered down the concrete steps and sprinted through a narrow corridor, searching for the lady in blue. Inside, it was cool, dark and earthy. The ceiling was low, the walls rough stone. Every so often, a bare ceiling bulb provided a pocket of struggling light. His feet slapped against the smooth stone tiles, the only sound he could hear. But where did she go? He slowed down, thinking she must have lost him.
A wisp of blue fabric shot down a hallway to his left. He wasn’t sure where she’d come from but now he was closing the gap on her. He turned down the same corridor to find that she was twenty yards ahead, and moving fast—she’d doubled the distance between them in the time it took Felix to mistakenly conclude that he was gaining on her. This corridor was longer—much longer—than the first. It was also angled downward, making him feel like he was going a hundred miles an hour. He was running fast and out of control, almost missing a pair of stairs, just barely avoiding a major wipeout. He kept his feet, using the walls for balance, and barreled ahead.
When the next set of stairs appeared, he was better prepared, and hurdled them without breaking stride. The little voice in his head was back, reminding him that the woman was leading him deep below the ground. Chasing a vampire to the center of the earth—to her lair—probably wasn’t very smart. But, the little voice added, vampires can’t tolerate holy ground, right? So she couldn’t be a vampire. So maybe she really was a ghost. What’s the difference, you idiot? You shouldn’t be chasing after ghosts either.
The corridor ended abruptly and the woman blurred away to her right, her dress whipping around the corner. Seconds later, Felix arrived at the wall. Hallways ran in both directions. She was nowhere in sight. He stopped to listen, breathing hard, sweat streaming down his face.
He heard a faint noise coming from the corridor to his left. He took off in that direction, but his wet sneakers lost their grip on the smooth stone floor and he slipped and slammed into a wall, grunting as the ensuing pain from body-checking solid stone shot up his shoulder. He ran on. The noise was getting louder. It sounded like a child banging on a pot with a wooden spoon. The noise was too loud, too glaringly obvious in the silence. Was she trying to draw him in? Was this a trap? What the hell was he doing?
He plunged through a doorway, stuttering to a stop before colliding into a long table stacked atop another long table. The woman appeared at the far side of a room filled with chairs and more tables and an assortment of bric a brac. She was moving incredibly fast, a blue streak against the pale walls. And just before she disappeared through another doorway, she glanced over her shoulder. Their eyes met—and then she was gone.
Felix chased after her—even though he had the chills so badly every electrified hair on his body was threatening to ignite—and emerged into a room full of moving boxes and tall metal storage racks packed with candles, dishes, goblets and other small items. He crossed the room, passing through yet another doorway. The voice in his head was screaming at him: Where the hell are you going?
The woman breezed through a doorway to his right, her blue dress billowing out behind her. He followed her into a small dark room that smelled of rain and dirt. He skidded to a halting stop and quickly scanned the room, his eyes on high alert for a shock of blue. His breaths were coming fast. There was a noise off to his right. He bolted around a chest-high stack of boxes and came to a wall. And set within the wall… was a door. It was open a crack.
Hand shaking, he reached out for the doorknob before realizing it didn’t have one. He paused, confused, then curled his fingers around the edge of the door, feeling the biting coldness of steel. He took a deep breath, and in one motion, flung it open and jumped back.
He was greeted by a blast of cool damp air and a sight he never imagined he would see in a million years. Too stunned to move, he stared straight ahead, standing at the entrance of a tunnel that seemed to go on forever. It wasn’t for lack of light that he couldn’t see where it ended. Encased in antique-looking metal cages, powerful bulbs (LEDs, or something else like it), brightly illuminated the tunnel.
Not sure why he was doing this—curiosity? madness?—he drifted inside. It was wide, twice the width of the corridors to his back, the ceiling high and vaulted. He knew this had to be one of the tunnels Lucas and Allison had been talking about at the Caffeine Hut. He took a few steps, then thought better of it and ran back to the door, checking to make sure it wasn’t going to close shut and lock him in. There was no doorknob on this side either, just another keyhole. He closed it and opened it and closed it and opened it. Then he did it all over again for good measure. It seemed safe enough. It couldn’t be locked without a key. So as long as no one ventured down here and locked him in he figured he’d be okay to go exploring for a minute.
The air was still, heavy with moisture, and yet there was no sign of water. The floor was hard, dry and flat. The walls were concrete. So were the floors and ceiling. Miles of cold monotonous gray encased everything. Industrial cables, pipes and plastic tubes crisscrossed along the ceiling like veins and arteries. The lights buzzed in the funereal stillness. About twenty feet in, he spotted a glint of something—a reflection?—on the wall up ahead and to his right. It soon became apparent that the ceiling lights were skating across lots of shiny things on the wall, and those shiny things were reflecting back at him. He went over to have a closer look. The shiny things turned out to be plaques. Every four or five feet, squarish, postcard-sized plaques were imbedded in the concrete. Most were a bronze color—copper?—and tarnished at the edges.
He examined the closest one, the one at eye level. There was something on it. Some kind of writing? An inscription? He breathed hot air on it and buffed it with his shirtsleeve. Letters began to emerge. R. R-O. Robert? It was a name… and dates. It said:
Robert Filton, Jr.
1734-1792
Felix gasped and stumbled back. This was no ordinary wall. Below each plaque there was a rectangular impression etched into the concrete like a pencil mark on a piece of paper. He knew what this was. These were storage lockers. Storage lockers for bodies. He was looking at coffins. They were crammed into the wall from top to bottom, and their reach appeared to extend as far as the tunnel itself. An old sepia-toned picture from his Western Civ textbook of the Catacombs in Rome flashed through his mind.
There was a cemetery below campus. And Felix was standing in it.
His skin crawled as a frosty chill slithered into the pit of his stomach, freezing his insides. He backpedaled until he’d pressed himself up against the opposite wall, staring open-mouthed at the bank of coffins. There had to be hundreds of them, maybe even thousands. Thousands of dead people down here with him. Nobody knew he was here. Suddenly, he no longer had any interest in finding the woman in the blue dress. He turned and started running flat out toward the door.
It slammed shut.
And then the lights went out.
He froze for a moment as a tingling shiver flashed down his spine. The darkness was complete. Light simply couldn’t exist in this subterranean world. Then he reached out until his fingers made contact with the nearest wall. His heart racing, he took a few steps toward the door, skimming his fingers along the wall to keep his feet going in the right direction, feeling its coarse, sandpaper-like surface and the tiny ridges left by trowel blades.
“We’v
e been waiting for you, Felix.”
The voice—a woman’s voice—was simultaneously coming from nowhere and everywhere.
Felix went cold with fear. He yanked his head around, trying to pinpoint the woman’s—the ghost’s—voice.
“We’ve been waiting for so many years,” she said.
With one hand on the wall and the other out in front of his body, he lurched forward, stumbling toward the door, anticipating at any moment to feel cold dead ghost hands wrapping around him, pulling him down.
His outstretched fingers stubbed painfully into something with a smooth cold surface—the door. Frantically, he ran his hands all over it, searching for the doorknob. Then he remembered it didn’t have one. He pounded on it, yelling for help.
“Felix.”
The voice was right behind him. He felt like she was whispering in his ear, like her lips were brushing against his skin.
He spun around, awaiting the caresses of the ghost’s icy fingers on his face. “What do you want?” he shouted, his voice high and wild. He banged on the door with his elbow. Each thump was met by an echo.
“I want you to find your truth,” she answered.
“What?”
“The choice is yours.”
“What choice?” he asked unsteadily, only vaguely aware that he was having a conversation with a ghost.
“The only choice that matters. Welcome, Felix.”
Then the lights came back on.
Certain that he was going to be face-to-face with the ghost, he threw up his arms to protect himself.
An interminable moment passed.
He held his breath, and risked a peek between his forearms. He was all alone. It was just him. There was no woman in blue in the tunnel.
With a rush of adrenaline, he turned back to the door and tried to pry it open, but it was flush with the inner wall and his fingers couldn’t gain any leverage. He pounded on it. He kicked at it. But the door barely even rattled. When the echoes finally faded and died back to nothing and the silence returned, he attempted something else: He stuck his pinkie in the keyhole and wriggled it around. When all that was left was trying to use his finger as a key, he saw the writing on the wall and gave up. He would have to find another way out.
His legs were jittery and his heart was slamming hard and fast against his sternum as he headed down the tunnel. The ghost’s voice—he’d reached a definitive conclusion that she was a ghost—was still ringing in his head: I want you to find your truth. The choice is yours. He tried to avoid looking at the wall of coffins to his right. As irrational as it might seem in the safe light of day, at any moment, he half-expected an army of rotting corpses to come crawling out of their caskets. But it was like trying not to rubberneck on the highway at the scene of a twenty-car pile-up—his eyes were just drawn to the plaques. He read some of the names as he moved steadily through the corridor: Louis Multo 1763-1824. Sarah O’Reilly 1754-1813. Damn, he thought, awed. These people have been dead a long time.
He walked faster, his sneakers scuffling and squishing along on the concrete floor, wishing he hadn’t left his cell phone on his desk. When he arrived at another corridor that intersected with the one he was on he felt the tiniest bit of hope, and broke into a jog. The lights started to flicker. He stopped, waiting for the darkness—and the ghost in the blue dress—to return. Then all the lights lit up even brighter than before—all the lights but one. On the wall where the two tunnels converged a single bulb continued to flicker. He padded over to it, cautiously, hoping the ghost was trying to show him the way out.
She wasn’t.
Below the bulb were three plaques much bigger than the others. He rubbed off a water stain from the one in the center and read the name aloud: “Agatha Pierre-Croix.” The moment the syllables left his lips, all the lights in the tunnels dimmed and he felt a cold breath on his cheek.
He jumped back, his head twitching back and forth, waiting. When the ghost didn’t appear, he read the names on the plaques next to Agatha’s. This time, he read them silently: Constance Wethersby. Lucinda Stowe. He noticed that all three women had died the same year. Turning away from the wall, he started down the new tunnel, wondering what was so special about Agatha, Constance and Lucinda, and why they’d all died in 1829.
When he came upon another door (to his left), a trickling sense of hopefulness teased him with warm anticipation. It was squashed a moment later once he realized what he was dealing with. Like the door beneath St. Rose, it was made of steel, it didn’t have a doorknob, and only a key could open it it. Out of sheer desperation, he pounded on it, and listened as it boomed and echoed hollowly in the silence, racing up and down the tunnels, swirling like a storm in the stillness. He gave up shortly. It most likely led to a basement deep below another building where no one would be, especially at four in the morning—if that was the time. His watch was sharing space with his cell on his desk; he hadn’t exactly planned for this.
He tried to work out in his mind which direction he was going as he trudged along through the tunnel. He was probably heading south. But he wasn’t entirely sure about that since the ghost woman had mixed him all up in the labyrinth-like corridors beneath the church. The tunnel he was on branched off at forty-five degree angles like a trident. With three tunnels to choose from, he remembered Lucas—or was it Allison?—saying the tunnels connected to every building on campus. And if that was true, and it now appeared that it was, it meant there were miles of tunnels down here. He could walk forever and never find an exit if the only way out was through one of the doors. Because without a key—
I could actually die down here.
The second that thought crossed his mind he told himself to stop being such a wuss. He would find a way out. It just might take a while. He took the tunnel to his left and picked up the pace. When he came to a door—this one on his right—he didn’t waste much time trying to open it. He just kicked it a few times and yelled “Hello!” until he was sure if by some miracle someone was behind it they would have heard him.
Later—he didn’t know how much later because the people who constructed the bomb shelter hadn’t thought to hang any clocks on the walls—the tunnel forked, and he took the one to the left. His confidence was sagging, and he was operating on a hunch that he hoped would lead him back to Downey and Satler and the other dorms on the east side of campus; unless, of course, he was even more discombobulated than he felt, in which case, he could be heading due west toward the football stadium and no-man’s-land. His sense of direction was good, but this was madness.
Three doors and several forks later, he was starting to lose hope. It all looked very bleak. Everything was tilting against him. Even without the aid of a watch he knew he’d been down here a long while. The solid steel doors were impossible to break down, and according to Lucas and Allison, nobody knew about the tunnels except for the few people who ran the school—and the president and the dean probably didn’t spend their weekends sleeping in the basements of hundred-year-old buildings.
I really could die down here, he said to himself, and this time, he didn’t think he was acting like such a wuss. But was that really what the ghost was trying to do? Did she lure him into the tunnels so she could watch him slowly lose his mind and starve to death as he searched for a way out? Don’t panic, he told himself. Being stupid wouldn’t help. Freaking out wouldn’t help. But he had a damn good reason to freak out. After so much wandering around, the only thing he knew for sure was that the door beneath St. Rose was accessible and the rooms next to it were at least used occasionally. And as much as he didn’t want to be anywhere near the cemetery, maybe his best chance of escaping was to head back there and pound on the door and hope someone would happen by. Not a great plan. But better than insanity and starvation. He took one last look around before setting off to retrace his steps, thinking that if he hadn’t lost his bearings it would be a miracle.
Something on the ceiling caught his eye. He ran over, stopped beneath it, and stared straig
ht up at a manhole-sized opening carved out of the ceiling; it looked like a giant drill had bored its way through the earth. And then he saw something truly miraculous: sturdy-looking iron staples set within, and running all the way up to the top, of the cylinder—a ladder.
He jumped and grabbed hold of the lowest rung, then pulled himself up and started climbing. With only a few rungs left, he lifted his eyes, and what he saw caused the panic in his chest to flare: the ceiling was right over his head and the ladder seemed to run right smack into it—there was no place to go. He’d found a ladder, but it was a ladder to nowhere.
Then he lowered his gaze and realized that a small barren room was spread out before him, and that on the far side, attached to the wall, was a second ladder, its rungs descending down through another hole in the ceiling. Pulse racing, he swung his legs over the top of the ladder, scrambled across the concrete space and started to climb. He moved fast, the rusty bars passing beneath him one after the other: twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight, he counted, ticking them off in his head. He paused for a second to check for the ceiling—it was still fifteen or twenty feet above his head—then resumed his climb. Please don’t let this be a dead end. Please. When he reached the top, he looked over the last rung, hoping to find a big unlocked door with a luminous movie theatre style EXIT sign above it. But it was just another concrete room, this one even smaller than the first. He got to his feet, keeping one arm over his head to make sure he didn’t crack it on the low ceiling.
The space was tight, little more than a walk-in closet; it was a damn good thing he wasn’t claustrophobic. If he stretched out his arms he could touch two sides with his fingertips, and he had to hunch down to avoid scraping his skull. At least the light was still good. There were two bulbs in the room, both burning bright: One behind the ladder, and the other directly across from it, each protected by the odd metal casings like the others in the tunnels.