as the Schhss now,” Neumann said.
Then without warning the narrow passage came to a dead end. They
stopped at what appeared to be a blank wall, in front of which was a
pile of rubble, evidently the remains of a long-ago cave-in.
“Jesus,” Ben said. “Are we lost?”
Without a word, Neumann scraped some of the rubble aside with his boot,
exposing a rusty iron rod about four feet long, which he hoisted with a
flourish.
“It’s undisturbed,” Neumann said. “This is good for you. It has not
been used for many years. They have not discovered it.”
“What are you talking about?”
Neumann took the iron rod, wedged it underneath a boulder, and leaned
his weight on it until the rock began to dislodge, revealing a small
irregular passageway no more than two feet high and three or four feet
wide.
“During the war we’d move this rock back and forth to hide the final
passage.” He pointed out grooves in the rock scored, Ben assumed,
decades earlier. “Now you’re on your own. I’ll leave you here. This
is a very narrow crawl way and very low, but you can get through it, I
believe.”
Ben leaned closer and examined it with horrified fascination. He felt a
wave of panic.
This is a god damned coffin. I don’t think I can do it.
“You’ll travel about, oh, maybe two hundred meters. It’s most of the
way level, but then it goes uphill at the very end. Unless it’s caved
in since I was here as a boy, you’ll come to a keyhole slot opening.”
“It opens right into the Schloss?”
“No, of course not. The entrance is gated. Maybe even locked. Probably
so.”
“Now you tell me.”
Neumann drew a rusty-looking skeleton key from a pocket of his old green
parka. “I can’t tell you for sure if this will work, but the last time
I tried it, it did.”
“The last time being fifty years ago?”
“More than that,” Neumann admitted. He extended his hand. “Now I say
good-bye,” he said solemnly. “I wish you much luck.”
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR.
It was a formidably tight squeeze. It must have taken real courage and
determination for the Resistance fighters to make this final approach to
the Schloss, and do it repeatedly, Ben thought. No wonder they had made
use of a boy like the young Fritz Neumann, who could slip through this
space easily.
Ben had wriggled through crawl holes like this before, in the caves of
White Sulphur Springs, but never for more than a few feet before they
broadened out. This, however, appeared to be hundreds of yards long.
Only now did he fully understand what veteran cavers meant when they
insisted that their subterranean pursuit allowed them to face down
primordial terrors–the fear of darkness, of falling into the void, of
being trapped in a maze, of being buried alive.
But there was no choice, certainly not now. He thought only of Anna and
summoned up the will.
He entered the hole, headfirst, feeling a cold rush of air. At its
opening, the passage was about two feet high, which meant that the only
way to move through it was to slither on his stomach like an earthworm.
He removed his pack and pushed off with his feet, pulling with his arms,
nudging his pack ahead of him. There was an inch or two of frigid water
on the tunnel floor. Quickly his pants became soaked through. The
tunnel angled sharply one way, then another, forcing him to contort his
body.
Then, at last, the passageway began to widen, its ceiling rising to four
feet, enabling him to lift his numbed belly out of the ice water, get to
his feet, and stoop-walk.
It was not long, though, before his back began to ache, and rather than
continue he stopped for a moment and set down the pack, resting his
hands on his thighs.
When he was able to go farther, he noticed that the ceiling was lowering
again, back to two, maybe three feet high. He got onto his hands and
knees and began scuttling along like a crab.
But not for long. The rocky floor bruised his kneecaps. He attempted
to ease the stress by putting his weight on his elbows and toes instead.
When he wearied of that, he continued crawling. The ceiling became
lower still, and he turned onto his side, pushing with his feet and
pulling with his arms along the winding tunnel.
Now the ceiling height had diminished to no more than eighteen inches,
scraping against his back, and he had to stop for a moment to suppress a
wave of panic. He was back to belly-crawling again, only this time
there was no end in sight. His headlamp shone a beam for twenty feet or
so, but the coffin-sized, even coffin-shaped tunnel seemed to go on and
on. The walls seemed to narrow.
Through the scrim of his fear, he observed that the passage appeared to
be winding slowly uphill, that water no longer pooled on the floor,
though it was still damp, and that, horribly, rock was now scraping
against both his stomach and his back.
He continued pushing his pack ahead of him. The tunnel was now barely
twelve inches high.
Ben was trapped.
No, not trapped, not yet, exactly, but it certainly felt that way.
Terror overwhelmed him. He had to squeeze himself through. His heart
raced, his body flooded with fear, and he had to stop.
The worst thing, he knew, was to panic. Panic caused you to freeze up,
lose flexibility. He breathed slowly in and out a few times, then
exhaled completely to reduce his chest diameter so he could fit through
the passage.
Sweating and clammy, he forced himself to squirm ahead, trying to focus
on where he was going and why, how crucial it was. He thought ahead, to
what he would do once he got into the Schloss.
The uphill slope was becoming steeper. He inhaled and felt the walls
press in on his chest, keeping him from filling his lungs with air. This
prompted a surge of adrenaline, which made his breathing fast and
shallow, made him feel as if he were about to suffocate, and he had to
stop once again.
Don’t think.
Relax.
No one else knew he was down here. He would be buried alive here in
this pitch-black hell where there was no day or night.
Ben found himself listening to this voice with skepticism, as his
braver, better self now assumed command of his brain. He began to feel
his heart slow, felt the delicious cold air hit the bottom of his lungs,
felt calm spread through his body like ink on a blotter.
Steadily now, with an inner serenity, he urged his body along, earth
wormed wriggled, ignoring the chafing of his back.
Suddenly the ceiling soared upward and the walls widened, and he got to
his aching hands and knees and crawled up the incline. He had arrived
at a sort of twilit grotto, where he was able to stand fully, blessedly,
upright.
He was aware of the faintest glimmering of light.
It was a very dim and distant light, but to him it seemed almost as
bright as day, as joy-inspiring as sunrise.
Directly ahead of him was the cave exit, and it was indeed shaped a
little like a keyhole. He scrambled up a scree pile, then sort of half
mantled himself into the lip of the opening, pushing down with both
hands until he could support his body on rigid arms.
There he saw the close-set rusted iron bars of an ancient gate that was
fitted into the irregular cave mouth as tightly as a manhole cover. He
could not make out what lay behind the gate but he could see an oblong
shaft of light, as if from under a door.
He drew out the skeleton key Neumann had given him, inserted it into the
lock, and turned it.
Tried to turn it.
But it would not turn. The key would not move.
The lock was rusted shut. That had to be it; the old lock hadn’t been
replaced, at least not for decades. The entire thing, he saw, was one
solid mass of rust. He wriggled the key back and forth again, but it
would not turn.
“Oh, my God,” Ben said out loud.
He was done for.
This was the one thing neither he nor Neumann had anticipated.
He could see no other way in. Even if he had the tools, there was no
way to dig around the gate; it was embedded in solid rock. Would he now
have to somehow climb back out?
Or maybe … Maybe one of the bars was so rusted through that he could
push it out. He tried that, banging his gloved fist against the iron
bars until the pain was too great, but no: the gate was solid. The rust