Crying Wolf

by Peter Abrahams

  “You’re like a Boy Scout,” Grace said. “With those matches.”

  “Or a pothead,” Nat replied. There were potheads at Inverness, but not nearly as many as at Clear Creek High.

  Izzie laughed. She followed Grace through the opening, just as easily. Nat went last.

  The match burned his fingers. He dropped it, lit another. The top of his head brushed the ceiling. “What is this place?” Izzie said.

  Hard-packed dirt floor, damp air, a dripping sound, and the three pipes, the fattest one wrapped with asbestos. Nat recognized asbestos: they had some in the basement at home. “I think it’s a steam tunnel,” he said.

  “What’s that?”

  “For heating the campus.”

  “That’s how they do it?”

  Nat laid his hand lightly on the pipe. It felt cold. “Maybe at one time,” he said. He noticed a light switch on the wall, flicked it. Nothing happened.

  “For heating the campus?” Grace said. “Does that mean there’s a whole underground network, connecting every building?”

  “Makes sense,” Nat said.

  “Wow,” Grace said, already on her way. He followed with the match, cupped in his hand.

  “Does this have anything to do with the TV thing?” Izzie said.

  “Who cares?” said Grace, moving on. Nat heard Izzie coming closer from behind, felt her hand on his shoulder, briefly. He lit another match and kept going.

  They walked down, down because the floor seemed to be sloping slightly, down the steam tunnel, Nat leading with the matches after the first hundred feet or so, the twins following. “This is so cool,” one of them said. One of them: but he couldn’t tell which, and it was the kind of thing either might say.

  “Who said that?” he asked.

  “Me.” They answered together, at once, and both laughed. Nat laughed too. What the hell. And it was pretty cool down in the steam tunnel. He tried to figure out their direction-were they under the quad or going the other way? — and could not. Once he thought he heard a guitar playing somewhere overhead, very faint; after that, nothing but the sounds they made themselves, and from time to time, dripping water.

  Nat had used up half the pack of matches before they came to a junction, a kind of crossroads, with an intersecting tunnel. He extended the match flame in all three directions: straight ahead and to the left, neither appearing different from what they’d already explored, and to the right. To the right was different: curtained off with spider webs, silvery and furred with dust. That meant-while Nat was thinking about what it meant, his match touched a silver strand, and flame ran up it like a fuse, followed the geometric pattern of the web, burned itself out in the center.

  “That’s like a whole art project, right there,” one of the twins said. But which one: Nat really wanted to know this time. He turned, holding up the match. Their faces glowed in its light; the gold flecks in their eyes sparkled; he learned nothing.

  “Maybe we should head back,” he said.

  “Why?” said Izzie.

  “We’re running out of matches, for one thing.”

  “So?” she said. “We can always feel our way back. Why not-”

  “Go till the last match,” Grace said.

  Why not? Nat could think of reasons, but none that wouldn’t sound wimpy. They weren’t lost or anything like that, hadn’t even left campus; and feeling their way back would be easy with the pipes. “Which way?” he said.

  “Isn’t it obvious?” said Grace. She reached out and swept away the unburned webs. The webs: they meant that no one had gone that way in some time. And the corollary: that there had been traffic in the other passages.

  They entered the right-hand passage, Nat leading. Now there were no pipes but the asbestos-wrapped one. There were also spiderwebs brushing their faces, and occasional soft things under their feet. Nat heard water dripping again, louder now, and for a moment thought he felt a warm breeze on his face. He was down to four matches when Izzie said, “I kicked something funny.”

  They stopped. Nat bent down with his match, saw a magazine on the floor. He picked it up, blew off the dust, rubbed away grime with the heel of his hand: a Playboy magazine from May 1963. Grace took it, leafed through. In the match light, smiling nudes from long ago flickered by. “Incredible,” she said.

  “It is?” said Nat.

  “She means the hairdos,” Izzie said.

  “Not just that,” Grace said. “Look how wholesome they are. Like a bunch of virgins with those tits and asses stuck on.”

  “You think?” said Izzie, taking a step forward for a better view. The next moment, the very moment when the thought they look pretty good to me was going through Nat’s mind, there was a cracking sound and Izzie dropped through the floor. Nat reached out for her, losing the match, caught her by the sleeve of her jacket; a sleeve made of some slippery material, and he lost that too, and in the pitch blackness, she fell.

  No one screamed. The twins weren’t the screaming type, and neither was he. Silence; the next sound a thump, down below.

  Nat dug the matchbook out of his pocket, almost lost his grip on that too, almost couldn’t get a match lit; but he did. Grace was on her hands and knees by then, peering into a hole in the floor: a dirt floor, but beneath an inch or two of dirt lay what was left of a square door or hatch cover. Just the rotted outer frame and the hinges-the rest was splinters and a hole.

  “Izzie?” Grace called down into it. “Izzie?”

  No response.

  Nat knelt beside her, lowered the match into the hole. He saw nothing; or almost nothing. Down there somewhere, how far he couldn’t tell, and off to one side, was a globe, a crystal globe that reflected the feeble match light from countless angles.

  “What do you think-” he began, and then saw Grace getting a grip on a support beam at the edge of the hole. “No,” he said, grabbing her arm. She shook him off in one violent motion, then heaved herself down into the hole, hanging from the beam by her hands. The next moment she swung forward, like a gymnast on the high bar, but unlike a gymnast, went hurtling into the dark. Her body overprinted the crystal globe, then came a shattering sound, but light and almost musical, and Nat thought: chandelier. Grace, trailing a comet’s tail of match-lit crystals, fell from sight.

  Nat heard a thump, much like the first, followed by the tinkle of crystals raining down, and then:

  “Ow.”

  Followed by: “Iz? Are you all right?”

  “I was until you landed on my ankle.”

  “Then why didn’t you say anything?”

  “Spiderwebs in my mouth.”

  The match went out.

  “Nat?”

  “Yeah?”

  “We can’t see you.”

  He lit another match. Two left in the pack.

  “That’s better. Doesn’t he look like the Cheshire Cat?”

  Nat leaned through the hole as far as could, held out the match at arm’s length, saw what must have been their faces, two pale ovals tilted up in the dark. “No one’s hurt?”

  “We’re fine.”

  “It’s kind of soft.”

  “Like a bed.”

  “What’s down there?”

  “Hard to tell.”

  “But it’s promising.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  Silence.

  “Wait right there,” Nat said. “I’ll be back.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “For help.”

  “Who said anything about help?”

  “How are you going to get out?” Nat said.

  He heard a soft crash, followed by tinkling glass, then silence.

  “Could this be-?” one of them said.

  “Not a-?”

  “Mais oui.”

  “Like a sign.”

  He heard them laughing together. “What’s going on?” he called.

  “Nat? Come on down.”

  “What?”

  “We’ve got a candle.”

  “From
above.”

  “A big fat one.”

  “So?”

  “What do you mean-so?”

  “I mean what about getting back up?” Nat said.

  Pause. Nat heard them talking, but too low to distinguish the words. “Just toss the matches down, if you’re going to be like that,” one of them said. Had to be Grace. She must have realized it was a chandelier before she jumped, must have thought she could hang on to it and somehow lower herself down. But still: she’d leaped into darkness, an unknown darkness. He’d seen it.

  “Grace?” he said.

  “Yeah?”

  The match went out. One left. “How will you find them in the dark?” Nat said.

  “No clue,” said Grace. “Wasn’t my idea.”

  “If everyone just shuts up,” Izzie said, “we’ll hear them land.”

  A dumb idea. Nat heard a giggle: Grace’s giggle, surely. Then came silence, a deep silence down there under the campus. He thought of the land above, the way he’d seen it on the drive out of town in the Rolls, ancient and austere. An uncomfortable thought from down where he was, beneath it, although he didn’t know why. They weren’t lost, or anything like that.

  “Trust me,” Izzie said; had to be Izzie.

  “Was that you, Izzie?”

  “Who else?”

  Only one left. A dumb idea. Nat dropped the matchbook through the hole, just let it go. He felt the friction strip as it slid off his fingertips.

  13

  “Thus speaks the red judge, ‘Why did this criminal murder? He wanted to rob.’ But I say unto you: his soul wanted blood, not robbery; he thirsted after the bliss of the knife.” Identify the quotation; then, if you must watch a movie this weekend, rent the robbery-gone-wrong video of your choice.

  — Friday afternoon seminar assignment, Philosophy 322

  “Freedy?”

  He grunted.

  “If you’re going to be staying for a while, and of course you’re always welcome, as I’m sure you know-we’re a family, after all, it only takes two, and-”

  “Just spit it out.”

  “I wondered whether you were considering getting some kind of job. For contributing to the communal pot, to coin a phrase.”

  Freedy stared at her across the kitchen table-he was only trying to drink his coffee in peace, for Christ sake, but there she was, head twisted a little, having trouble with the clasp on a huge hoop earring-he stared at her and said nothing. No comment. No comment, at first because he thought he’d heard her asking him to pay for her dope, then when he understood, because it didn’t deserve comment. She was his so-called mother. And look at her. Didn’t she owe him, owe him big-time? And why was it so fucking cold in the house?

  Click. The clasp snapped into place. Couldn’t she see how ridiculous she looked, like some gypsy wanna-be? He checked out his own reflection in the little mirror framed with seashells hanging over the sink. No gypsy there: a fuckin’ animal, but with a brain, as the ponytail showed.

  She was saying something: “… when you used to help out in the maintenance department, up at the college?”

  Was she still on the job kick? “I remember a lot of things.”

  A good line. She waited for him to say more, sitting absolutely still. She was good at sitting absolutely still. He remembered a lot of things, but nothing at that moment. Outside the window, an icicle broke off and dropped with a faint thud in the snow.

  “That wasn’t so bad, was it?” she said. “The maintenance.”

  He thought of answering, No comment. No comment was what people with brains said. But she was pissing him off. “Are you telling me to look for a job?”

  “Not telling, Freedy. Nothing like that. And just something temporary. As temporary as you like.”

  As temporary as he liked. Was there some meaning in that, some hidden meaning? Freedy was mulling over that when he was hit, from out of nowhere, by an amazing idea, the kind of idea that proved his braininess. It tied things together so nicely, at the same time backing her right against the wall. He showed her that smile of his-a ten-thousand-dollar smile, according to a friend of Estrella’s who worked for a dentist, and said: “Then I’ll need my birth certificate, won’t I?”

  “Birth certificate? Why?”

  “Job application, what else?” Complete bullshit, of course-all they ever asked for was your license and social, but did she know that? Not a chance: never held down a real job in her life. So now he had her. No surprise there. They weren’t on the same field, not when it came to brainpower. His brainpower came from elsewhere.

  She did have one little surprise for him. Freedy had expected the birth certificate would be lost, or unavailable, or not around for some reason or other, but after a minute or two in her bedroom, she came back with it. “Here you go, Freedy.”

  He scanned it. Freedy hated official forms. They never made any sense. Like this one, with all these boxes and lines and different size print, even print in different whatever they were called, like old English or something. Standard Certificate of Live Birth: what the hell was that? Like they had certificates of dead births? Didn’t have them for abortions, which he knew for a fact because of Estrella’s. He’d had to drive her. Hours in the waiting room, hours on the freeway going back-flipped-over truck blocking the lanes, he could still see the blood on the pavement-but no certificate.

  Freedy’s eyes roamed the stupid form, picked out his own name, and farther down hers, Starry Knight, and down below that was what he was after, must have taken five minutes to find it: FATHER. Full name: Unknown.

  Huh? Freedy didn’t say huh — if he did it was real quiet-but that was what he thought. He’d set such a nice trap for her, because Walrus’s real name should have been there, right? Maybe not real name, but the legal one, the way Starry Knight was her legal name. And it wasn’t. The space was blank. Meaning? He looked up at her. She was watching him.

  “Don’t lose it, Freedy. It’s the only proof of your existence.”

  “Is that supposed to be funny?”

  “Yes, Freedy.” Her hand came up a little off the table, as though for defense. “You know the way bureaucrats think.”

  “That makes it funny?” But he didn’t know what she was talking about.

  They stared at each other across the kitchen table.

  A job with maintenance: out of the question. Down in the tunnels with his flashlight, although he almost didn’t need it, knowing his way around so well, Freedy got angry just thinking about the idea. What did she want him to do: go backward in life? That wasn’t the way to financial success. Freedy knew the way to financial success, he and Estrella had watched hundreds of infomercials and she’d figured out what they all had in common: make a plan and stick to it. There was one other part, Freedy recalled as he came to the junction of D36 and Z13-aboveground everything had a fancy name, but down in the tunnels it was just A this and B that, the letters standing for tunnels and the numbers for buildings-one other part to the formula, what was it? Oh, yeah: have an idea. First have an idea, then make a plan, then stick to it. He already had his idea, a big one-own a pool company in Florida. And a plan-raise the money for it by ripping off high-tech shit at the college and unloading it on Saul Medeiros. Sticking to the plan meant doing it a lot.

  Freedy took the turn into Z. Building 13-Lanark, was that the name? — was a girls’ dorm on the quad, or maybe coed; they were almost all coed now. He hated those words: coed, quad. He hated the whole college scene, the backpacks, the notices stuck up all over the place, the sitting in the grass and talking. And the football team: biggest hoax of all. His high-school coach had once taken them all to a game. They-the fucking high-school team-could have beaten the shit out of Inverness. And he himself could have wrecked anyone they had out there. A joke. Didn’t mean some of the college girls weren’t all right; some were. But what he’d never been able to figure out back then was how any of them could be interested in those college boys. Now that he’d been around a bit, he could see h
ow growing up isolated in their rich little suburbs meant the girls never had a chance to meet a real man, let alone a fuckin’ animal. Back then, he’d never made a move on any of them. He’d been just a kid-a big kid, but not as big as now, and no ponytail-and besides, there’d been Cheryl Ann. Those blow jobs. Married a doctor. The only two thoughts he had about her. He tried to fit them together and could not. Wasn’t she a townie just like him?

  Night: no maintenance guys in the tunnels at night. Freedy followed Z tunnel under the campus. He hadn’t liked working maintenance but he liked it down in the tunnels. On slow days the workers would sometimes curl up in corners here and there and sleep, but not him; he’d always roamed around till quitting time.

  Freedy liked the sounds too. There were sounds down in the tunnels, but not his. He moved silently. Just another one of his skills. He moved silently, heard switches click, the skittering of tiny animals, and sometimes voices from up top, carried weirdly down by the pipes. Like now, at the junction of N, he heard someone laughing. That was kind of weird too, because the sound was louder than the human sounds he remembered, too loud to have been carried by the pipes. He glanced down N, saw it all screened off with cobwebs, remembered it had always been like that, at least as far back as the time he was a summer worker. N led to the old field house, torn down long ago, and beyond that to building 41, now heated with gas. The college was always doing something new, building, tearing down, switching the distro systems, buying up Cheryl Ann’s old house. What gave them the right? Freedy stood there at the junction of Z and N for a minute or so, listening for that laugh again-a woman’s laugh-but it didn’t come.

  Freedy moved on. Z did a funny little thing just before building 13. It came to a sort of drop-off, like one of those manholes, except uncovered. No railing or anything, just a sudden black hole in the floor. The tunnel continued straight down for thirty feet or so, maybe more, and you had to pivot and climb down a steel ladder bolted to the walls. The maintenance guys-old drunks, most of them-liked to scare the high-school boys with their stupid stories. Freedy didn’t remember this particular story-something about a broken neck-but he remembered the drop-off and had his beam on it in plenty of time. He climbed down the ladder, crossed a brick floor, shut off his light, put his ear to the door and listened in the perfect darkness.