Catacombs of Terror! (10 page)

We stopped at the edges of the tarpaulin. I told Kafka where the CCTV cameras were. I didn't tell him about my inkling that there were maybe infrared cameras down in the hole. I guessed that he knew enough already. I told him to be very, very quiet. We made our way, zigzag fashion, to the hole. Kafka was impressed. But not favourably.

“That's a . . . that is a very deep hole. We're going down—there?” he said quietly.

I murmured a yes. He turned to look at me, to give me some kind of hard stare or something, but it was too dark for anything like that to work. So I just made a gesture. My gesture said
let's go
.

I went first. I climbed down about ten rungs and waited for Kafka. He was a couple of minutes getting his courage together, or deciding whether or not to run away. I waited some more. Then I saw his legs coming down. I carried on. When I thought we were about fifteen feet down I clicked my flashlight on. The light was blinding at first. Then I could see. But I couldn't see much. The sides of the hole were wet. I could see pebbles lodged in the clay. I aimed the light downwards. The air in the hole was misty. I thought that I could just about see the bottom, but it was pretty much lost in the mist, which glowed yellowish in the glare. And I could smell that strange sulphurous odour again. Colin whispered down to me, “What's that horrible smell?”

“Don't know. It was the same last night though. It's sulphur or something. Come on. We're only about a quarter of the way down.” I turned the light off.

The descent seemed to take an eternity. I got that feeling again, that there was nothing else in the universe than this hole, an endless tube through empty space. With two cold, wet humans in it. Both of them wishing they were somewhere—anywhere—else. I wasn't sure, but it seemed to me that the hole got narrower as we went down. It was about eight feet in diameter at the top, but if it got too narrow there wouldn't be enough room for both of us to stand at the bottom. It was going to be pretty damn cosy as it was. The smell was getting stronger, but then it seemed to fade. It was maybe coming up from the bottom of the hole in waves. The climb went on and on. My mind began to wander. Not surprising, I guess. I started to think about death. Death. You start to die the moment you're born. The whole of life is a series of close calls with death. Yeah, well. Whatever.

Finally I reached the bottom. There was more room than I expected. Kafka was just behind me. I stepped away from the ladder. I tried to speak as quietly as I possibly could.

“I'm going to turn the flashlight on. Close your eyes.” I pushed the switch. The light was searing, but I forced my eyes to get used to it. Fuck. Where in hell were we? I had been right about the flagstones and the three tunnels. They stretched off into impenetrable darkness like three hungry mouths. But I'd been way wrong about there not being much space down here. We were in a kind of dome. Like we were in a bell jar with an impossibly long neck, which was the hole we'd climbed down. Or a gigantic chimney. I was sure it hadn't been like this the night before. I was certain. I remembered how I'd traced my hands around the walls, just by turning around pretty much on the spot. Now we were standing in a circular chamber maybe twenty feet in diameter. It was as if the beam from my flashlight had made the walls shrink away, or . . . it was crazy. Maybe we'd come down a different hole? Perhaps there were more than one, and I'd not noticed the night before? Or maybe KHS had dug out the base of the hole since last night?

Even as I was thinking up these increasingly desperate explanations I knew they were bullshit. Something weird was going on. Possibly it needed a better word than ‘weird' to describe it, but I didn't have one to hand. And the smell was back, stronger than ever. It was horrible. Everything was so old it made my head hurt. I'd never been anywhere remotely like this before. It was old like—like a living thing could be old. Not like a place. I could almost feel its wheezing, impossibly aged breath sucking in and drooling out. There was mud and clay everywhere. The walls were made of it.

Dirty water dripped onto us from the sloping roof, and mud was scattered around in clumps and splattered on the walls. Pools of brownish, greyish water collected in puddles on the flagstones. And it was cold. The rope from the winch hung down with a big bucket, a bucket big enough for a body or two on the end of it. I looked at Kafka. His face looked terrible. The yellowish light didn't help, but he looked really bad. I wondered if I looked as bad as he did. Worse, probably. Yeah, well. I wasn't aiming to make a good impression anywhere. Not for the foreseeable future. I asked him if he was okay, and he shook his head slowly. He drew his finger across his throat. I knew how he felt. I wanted a cigarette badly, but I thought that I'd better not. I pulled my half-bottle from my pocket and took a deep swallow. I passed it to Kafka. He had what looked like an even bigger swallow.

I slowly swept the torch around the chamber, pausing the beam briefly at each tunnel entrance. There wasn't a sound. Just a terrible, terrible silence. I never felt less like whistling a tune in my life. I had no idea which tunnel we might walk along. My sense of direction was back at the office. The sulphur smell came and went. Water dripped down on us.

“Which tunnel?” I asked Kafka, not expecting him to have any firm thoughts on that one. He just stared at me. Okay. I pointed at random. “Let's take that one,” I said flatly. I mean, for fuck's sake, they all looked the same. Kafka looked hopelessly at me, pulled a tape recorder from his inside pocket, and pressed record. He slipped it into his bag. We started walking.

The darkness of the tunnel closed in on us instantly. The beam from my flashlight struggled to penetrate the gloom. The dark in here was thicker, like it was treacle. I glanced back. The chamber was hardly visible, and we were only a few steps inside the tunnel. It was like walking into a coffin. The walls of the tunnel were the same as the chamber—semi-smooth mud or clay. There wasn't any trace of spade or pick marks on it. Maybe some sort of machine had hollowed it out.

“Let's try another tunnel,” I muttered to Kafka. I don't know if he heard me. We bumped into each other, but I think he got the idea. We turned back into the chamber. Horrible as it was, it was less unpleasant than the tunnel.

“I'm having some second thoughts, and a hell of a lot of them,” said Kafka in a strangled sort of voice. I gave him more whiskey. And then some more. I might have had some, too.

“Okay. That was horrible. I agree. Maybe the other tunnels won't be as bad,” I said. I noticed that I didn't sound too convincing. “Let's have some Charlie and see how we feel after that.” I opened the second little wrap and dipped my finger in the powder. Kafka did the same, and we rubbed it into our gums. I put the empty wrap in my pocket, had another swig of whiskey for luck, or something, and started towards another tunnel. Five steps into it I got the same feeling. We turned around and went back into the chamber.

“Right. Let's try the last one,” I said.

“Which one is that?” asked Kafka.

I had no idea. We had been a few paces down two of the tunnels. One of them was right behind us. But which of the others we'd tried, I couldn't say. My loss of direction was total.

“Well, which do you think?” I whispered.

“I haven't got a fucking clue, and that in itself worries the hell out of me. That one? Or that one? What
is
this place?”

I couldn't answer him. I didn't know. It was that simple, and that complicated.

“That one,” I said decisively, and walked towards the gaping darkness. This time we weren't turning back. This time we were going to find out what these tunnels were all about. This one was the same again—a ghastly, cloying, terrifying darkness of a sort I'd never known anywhere before. An intermittent dripping from the roof. I could feel the flagstones beneath my feet. My flashlight revealed nothing but the walls of the tunnel receding maybe ten feet or less before being devoured by the darkness. We walked slowly on. Nothing changed. Nothing at all. The silence got so fucking silent that it started to mess with my head. I stopped.

“Did you hear anything?” I asked, with a very clear idea of the answer I'd like to have heard.

“I don't—think—so,” whispered back Kafka. Wrong answer. Not badly wrong, but wrong enough.

“What d'you mean, you don't
think
so?”

“Well, did
you
hear anything?” hissed Kafka.

“I don't know,” I said. “Maybe. But I think it's this place. The quiet. Playing tricks on me. And you, too, by the sound of it.” Yeah. Somewhere there was a rational, scientific explanation for this. But it wasn't down here. It wasn't where we needed it. We carried on, even more slowly. The smell came back again, nauseatingly strong. For a split second it reminded me of death, of putrefying corpses, animal and human, piled up and up and rotting, like some kind of infernal compost . . . .

I tried to force the thought out of my head but it wouldn't go. The fetid black liquid seeping from the crushed carcasses at the bottom of the pile, the writhing masses of larval flies, the sickening miasma emanating from it . . . . I stumbled against the wall and sank to the floor. I dropped the flashlight and clamped my wet hands to my face, I bowed my head and gritted my teeth, and I tried to force the horrendous vision from my mind. But it got worse. And I think I passed out, because the next thing that happened was Kafka slapping me in the face. I woke up and grabbed his hand before he hit me again.

“What the
fuck
. . . ?”

“Shit, you just, you just collapsed. You dropped the torch and it went out and fucking hell it was so dark . . . . I found mine and turned it on and you were just, well, you were out. I mean I, I almost fucking lost it, I almost panicked and lost it, so I started slapping you . . . .”

“Well, cheers for that. There was some stuff in my head that was far, far worse than being slapped. Thanks. Thanks a lot.”

I was gasping. My gratitude was genuine.

“No problem. I don't mind saying I almost shat myself when your torch went out. Do the same if it happens to me. Bring me out of it, whatever it is. What happened?”

“You do not,
do not
, want to know. Let's just carry on. Where's my flashlight?”

“I dunno. I think it went over there somewhere.” Kafka gestured with his light. The beam raked the floor around us.

“Maybe it rolled. There's a sort of slope to this tunnel.”

“Yeah, maybe it rolled. So, let's see where it rolled to.”

I felt almost better. I was pissed off at having lost it badly enough to pass out. If Kafka hadn't been there I could have lain there for hours. Being an independent operator was one thing. Lying out cold in a hellhole God knows how far beneath the earth is another. I shook myself. Maybe I said, “Let's go,” or something. But we were walking on, further down, into the dark.

After a time, Kafka whispered, “Where's your fucking torch?”

We hadn't found it. We'd walked a few hundred yards I guess. But no flashlight. It couldn't have rolled this far.

“Maybe we missed it. Maybe it got stuck in a niche or something. Rolled up against a rock. I don't know.”

“What was that?” Kafka said.

“Sssh.”

There was a sound. It was very quiet. But not as quiet as silence. Like a low, droning mechanical chant. An indistinct murmuring. It was coming from somewhere ahead of us, in the dark. Fighting every urge of self-preservation we walked towards it.

“Turn off the light,” I said in a low voice. “Don't say anything at all.”

Colin killed the flashlight. The darkness was suffocating. The sound was still there, moaning from somewhere. I trailed my hand against the wall to keep some idea of where I was. The surface was wet and slick, and sort of ridged under my fingers. It was very cold. Like something dead.

Nothing happened for a time. We were walking. The sound was droning, with slight variations in its tone. It didn't seem to be getting any louder. Then the wall disappeared. My hand touched nothing. I pulled my hand away as if it had been burnt. I grabbed for Kafka, and he stopped.

“Okay,” I said in a voice only one notch above silence and one degree from panic. “Point the light at the floor. Turn it on.”

A couple of agonising seconds passed while Colin felt for the switch. Then a blurry circle of flagstones was illuminated. But faintly. As if the batteries were dying.

“Right. Move the beam—slowly—so it points to the right of where I'm standing.”

The illuminated circle travelled across the floor and up the wall, then forward along it. Where my hand had been was another tunnel, leading straight off to the right. The beam lit it only for three feet or so.

“Shit,” I whispered. “Shine it at the other side.” The light moved back across the floor and up. There was an identical tunnel the other side. I let out a long, slow breath.

“What are we going to do?” It was Kafka. His voice sounded controlled. Almost too controlled. “If this is some kind of maze . . . .”

“Then we're okay so long as we just keep straight on. If we don't take any turnings then we're . . . okay,” I ended, limply.

“All right. We'll walk straight on. For another ten minutes. Then we turn round. We get out,” he said firmly. “Ten minutes. Then we leave.” There wasn't much room for argument in his tone. I didn't feel like arguing anyway. We walked. The droning chant carried on at the same almost inaudible volume. Kafka kept the flashlight switched on, aimed at the ground. There were a lot of flagstones down here. Whoever had built this had been serious about it. I kept my hand trailing on the wall. After a while there was another absence. We stopped. Moved the light around a bit. There were another two tunnels off, one at each side. And the beam from the flashlight was definitely fading.