have been a ghost.
“Your shirt really pops in this weird light, ” I said.
“Yeah? ”
“Bitchin’.” The freight-train rumble rose again, louder than before. The
steel and concrete bones of the structure were grinding together.
The cat, with no need for goggles, led us out of the vestibule.
I followed Roosevelt, Doogie, and Sasha, who might have been three green
spirits haunting a catacomb.
The hardest thing I’d ever had to do in my life harder than attending my
mother’s funeral, harder than sitting by my father’s deathbed was to
leave Bobby alone.
From the vestibule, a sloping tunnel, ten feet in diameter, descended
fifty feet. After reaching the bottom, we followed an entirely
horizontal but wildly serpentine course, and with every turn, the
architecture and engineering progressed from curious to strange to
markedly alien.
The first passageway featured concrete walls, but every tunnel
thereafter, while formed of reinforced concrete, appeared to be lined
with metal. Even in the inadequately revelatory infrared light, I
detected sufficient differences in the appearances of these curved
surfaces to be confident that the type of metal changed from time to
time. If I’d lifted the goggles and switched on an ordinary UV
flashlight, I suspect that I would have seen steel, copper, brass, and
an array of alloys that I couldn’t have identified without a degree in
metallurgy.
The largest of these metal-lined tunnels were about eight feet in
diameter, but we traveled some that were half that size, through which
we had to crawl. In the walls of these cylindrical causeways were
uncounted smaller openings, some were two or three inches in diameter,
others two feet, probing them with the infrared flashlight revealed
nothing more than could have been seen by peering into a drainpipe or a
gun barrel.
We might have been inside an enormous, incomprehensibly elaborate set of
refrigeration coils, or exploring the plumbing that served all the
palaces of all the gods of ancient myths.
Unquestionably, something had once surged through this colossal maze,
liquids or gases. We passed numerous tributaries, in which were anchored
turbines with blades that must have been driven by whatever had been
pumped through this system. At many junctions, various types of gigantic
electrically controlled valves stood ready to cut off, restrict, or
redirect the flow through these Stygian channels.
All the valves were in open or half-open positions, but as we passed
each block point, I worried that if they snapped shut, we would be
imprisoned down here.
These tubes had not been stripped to the concrete, as had all the rooms
and corridors in the first three floors under the hangar.
Consequently, as there were no apparent lighting sources, I assumed that
workmen servicing the system had always carried lamps.
Intermittently, a draft stirred along these strange highways, but for
the most part the atmosphere was as still as that under a bell jar.
Twice, I caught a whiff of smoldering charcoal, but otherwise the air
carried only a faint astringent scent similar to iodine, though not
iodine, which eventually left a bitter taste and caused a mild burning
sensation in my nasal membranes.
The trainlike rumble came and went, lasting longer with each occurrence,
and the silences between these assaults of sound grew shorter.
With every eruption, I expected the ceiling to collapse, burying us as
irrevocably as coal miners are occasionally entombed in veins of
anthracite. Another and utterly chilling sound spiraled along the tunnel
walls from time to time, a shrill keening that must have had its source
in some machinery spinning itself to destruction, or else crawling these
byways was a creature that I had never heard before and that I hoped
never to encounter.
I fought off attacks of claustrophobia, then induced new bouts by
wondering if I were in the sixth circle of Hell or the seventh. But
wasn’t the seventh the Lake of Boiling Blood? Or did that come after the
Fiery Desert? Neither the blood lake nor the great burning sands would
be green, and everything here was relentlessly green. Anyway, Lower Hell
couldn’t be far away, just past the luncheonette that serves only
spiders and scorpions, around the corner from the men’s shop that offers