Tunnel of Secrets (2 page)

As far as I could tell, the tunnel we were exploring was right under the town square. A few months earlier, my brother Frank and I had discovered an old secret tunnel
below the Bayport Aquarium that a wildlife smuggler had been using to steal an endangered giant sea turtle. We didn’t know it then, but that tunnel turned out to be part of a whole network of abandoned secret passageways winding their way under Bayport. Some of them were hundreds of years old, but no one really knew who originally built them . . . or why.

Urbex had volunteered to help map the newly discovered tunnels. Keith and his team had a lot of experience exploring Bayport’s abandoned structures and sewers, so they were pretty well qualified to safely lead the expedition. I wasn’t an official Urbex member, but I knew Keith from rock-climbing class, so I’d decided to tag along at the last minute to get my mind off my friend Layla. It wasn’t working, though.

“I’m usually pretty confident around girls, but Layla always makes me kind of tongue-tied, you know?” I shared with Keith, who ignored me as he led us deeper into the tunnel. “Maybe it’s because her dad’s a cop.”

Keith started coughing like he’d gotten something stuck in his throat. It was pretty dusty in the tunnel, so I offered him a sip from my water bottle, but he just waved me off.

“Anyway, I finally worked up the guts to ask her out,” I continued, “but she went missing before I had the chance! I can’t help thinking if I had just asked her, maybe we would have been together the day she disappeared. Then I could have protected her from whatever happened.”

Keith stopped without saying anything and began studying his hand-drawn schematics of the different tunnels. “I
mean, at first, everyone was saying maybe she ran away, but that totally isn’t like her. She’s a genuinely happy person. And after Daniel went missing—I mean, come on, two kids from the same high school in one week?” I said, the detective in me starting to kick into gear. “You know the police have to be thinking it’s kidnapping at this point, or they wouldn’t have called a press conference on a Saturday.”

Keith swung around abruptly so that his headlamp shone right into my eyes, making me see spots.

“Would you shut it already?” he snapped. “I’m trying to concentrate.”

“Sorry, dude, just trying to make conversation,” I said, raising my hand to block the light—not that it did much good.

“Well, don’t,” Keith muttered.

“Sheesh! No need to get all aggro about it,” I said, wondering what had Keith so uptight.

He grunted. “Just stay here until I come back for you, okay? I’m going to check out that junction ahead.”

“Fine, whatever, man,” I said, trying not to get angry. I had invited myself on his expedition, after all. Keith had been pretty grumpy the whole morning, which was weird, because he usually joked a lot. I hadn’t thought he’d mind me tagging along with the Urbex crew, but I was starting to get the impression that I wasn’t welcome.

I watched Keith’s headlamp grow smaller as he walked down the tunnel. Honestly, I wasn’t thrilled about being
left alone. It can be pretty easy to get lost underground if you’re not careful. And the tunnels were spooky. Not that I was scared or anything. At least, not until a minute later, when Keith’s light went out and he seemed to vanish into the darkness.

“Keith?” I called out. “You okay, man?”

There was no reply, and my headlamp wasn’t powerful enough to see that far ahead. I tore off a strip of the neon-yellow reflective tape we all carried (the tape is easy to see when the light hits it), stuck it to a beam to mark my trail, and headed off down the tunnel. It ended at a T-section that split into two smaller tunnels. I shone my headlamp down one and then the other. Still no Keith.

I was about to call his name again when I felt the floor moving. A second later, a muffled thump sent a wave of vibrations through the tunnel.

I didn’t know what was going on, but it definitely wasn’t good. Before I had a chance to decide if I should go after Keith or run back to the rendezvous point, a
BOOM
rumbled through the tunnel, shaking the walls and knocking me off my feet.

There are two words you never want to have to worry about while exploring underground:
cave-in
. Judging by the chunks of dirt falling on my head, I was trapped in the middle of one! Instinct kicked in as the beam above me snapped. I rolled out of the way just in time to avoid being pinned to the floor. I slammed into the dirt wall where the
tunnel split. My headlamp flickered, but it was still working. Not that I liked what I saw.

The path we’d come down was now totally blocked by rocks and debris, leaving me with two choices: left or right. I had no idea which way Keith had gone, but the tunnel on the left had less debris blocking it, so that’s the one I took.

I pushed away all thoughts of being buried alive and kept my feet moving forward. Freezing up in a panic can be just as deadly as a falling beam.

I was focusing on taking slow breaths when I heard scraping and scratching. The sounds grew louder until I caught sight of the beam from a headlamp up ahead. Keith was on the ground, trying to clear away wreckage from another cave-in.

“Man, is it good to see you!” I cried. “What happened? Are you okay?”

Keith swiveled at the sound of my voice. He was covered in dirt and had a dazed look about him. “I’m, uh, okay. My ankle, it’s sprained, I think. I, uh, we need to get out of here.”

“I’m with you, man. I’ll help you dig.”

I quickly surveyed our situation. It looked like we were in some kind of underground chamber, only it was hard to tell because everything except the tunnel I’d come down was now walled off in rubble. It was mostly dirt and rock and some old beams, but then my headlamp flickered over something shinier on the ground.

I was about to move toward it when Keith started yelping,
“Forget about that! Why aren’t you digging?! We have to get out of here now!”

He almost seemed on the verge of attacking me. I guess some people really can’t stand being trapped in confined spaces. It seemed like an inconvenient phobia for the leader of an urban explorers club, but there was no time to think about that now. The two of us were trapped underground with a limited supply of air, and a wall of rubble between us and freedom.

A
S SOON AS WE SAW
the ground open up and swallow the Admiral’s statue, Charlene and I sprinted across the town square. When I looked over my shoulder, I saw Deputy Hixson right behind us.

The air was so thick with dust that it was impossible to see anything. Deputy Hixson ran up behind me and put a protective hand on my shoulder.

“Stay back, Frank! It may not be safe.”

“What do you think happened?” I asked.

“I have no idea,” he said. “Some kind of sinkhole? I’ve never seen anything like it.”

A crowd had started to gather, but the deputy kept everyone back until fire and emergency crews arrived.

It took a long time for the air to clear enough to actually see the giant hole in the ground where the Admiral’s statue had stood and even longer to see inside the crater itself. The statue lay on its back fifteen or twenty feet below the surface amid piles of debris. Amazingly, the bronze statue seemed to still be in one piece. Well, almost; the oversize key that had been attached to the ring on the Admiral’s belt was gone.

As I stared into the rubble-filled pit, I suddenly realized that the Admiral’s key wasn’t the only thing missing. So was Joe!

I’d been so distracted by what had just happened, I’d forgotten that Joe was somewhere under the town square exploring the old tunnels with the Urbex club. If he’d been anywhere nearby when the sinkhole collapsed, he could be trapped underground or . . . I didn’t want to think about it.

“Deputy!” I yelled. “My brother and some other Urbex members were underground exploring when this happened. They’re probably trapped!”

A man started shouting. “I think somebody’s down there!”

“Everybody, quiet!” ordered Deputy Hixson.

CRRRRCK
,
CRRRRCK
 . . .

A sound almost like rocks scraping together echoed upward from the sinkhole.

“We’re going to get you out!” I cupped my hands and yelled down. “Help is on the way!”

While the deputy organized and gathered tunneling gear,
a small boulder rolled away from a pile of wreckage at the sinkhole’s bottom. A second later, Joe popped out. And he was carrying a giant two-and-a-half-foot-long bronze key.

Joe looked up at me with a big grin.

“Hey, bro,” he said. “Anybody lose their keys?”

T
HE LOOK ON FRANK’S FACE
when I emerged with the key was almost worth nearly being buried alive. It turns out that the shiny object I’d spotted lying in the debris had been the Admiral’s missing key. The underground chamber Keith had been exploring was just a few yards from the sinkhole; he was seriously lucky the entire thing hadn’t collapsed on top of him.

The bottom of the sinkhole was crazy, like a bombed-out crater where a twenty-foot bronze giant was a taking a nap. I quickly examined the Admiral’s statue while the fire department hoisted Keith and me to the surface. Other than the lost key, the old guy looked none the worse for wear.

Frank reached out to pull me back onto solid ground. My
brother and I have this silent connection, sort of like twins (even though we’re a year apart), and I could tell that he was as relieved to see me as I was to see him. My excitement faded when I remembered that Keith and I hadn’t been the only explorers underground when the ground caved in.

“Chris and Scott are still down there,” I told Deputy Hixson. “We have to go back to find them right now.”

“Chris just texted me,” Keith said hastily, waving his phone at the deputy. “They made it out through another entrance.”

The deputy let out a huge sigh of relief. Then he took the heavy bronze key from me and examined it curiously.

“Lucky break everyone made it out okay,” he murmured. “Just make sure to have the paramedics check you out before you leave.”

“I’m fine, but I think Keith sprained his ankle pretty badly,” I said. I looked around, but he was already limping away. He seemed pretty shaken up by the whole ordeal, and I couldn’t really blame him for wanting to skedaddle as soon as possible. By the time the adrenaline rush from our close call had worn off, I was feeling a little shaky myself.

“Let’s clear the square until we can ensure the tunnels haven’t weakened the ground anywhere else,” Deputy Hixson announced.

“Deputy, what makes you so sure the ground collapsed because of the tunnels?” Charlene asked, tapping the digital recorder she carried with her everywhere. “They’ve been
there for hundreds of years, and this is the first time anything like this has ever happened.”

Deputy Hixson looked skeptically at the recorder. “What else could it be? This is the first time people have explored many of them, so it probably just stirred up some of the old foundations.”

“Can I quote you on that?” Charlene asked.

“What? No!” the deputy said with a frown.

“I don’t know what things looked like from up here, but underground it sounded like a series of explosions,” I offered.

“It seemed that way from aboveground, too,” Frank agreed.

“That doesn’t make a lick of sense,” Deputy Hixson said.

“It’s rare, but pockets of combustible gas can build up underground, although they usually need to be ignited in order to actually blow up,” Frank said, going into Science Guy mode.

“Maybe the Admiral ate too many beans today,” I suggested.

The deputy laughed so hard he snorted. He quickly tried to cover it up, clearing his throat. “It’s probably just some sort of natural geological thing, like Frank said. We won’t know more until the experts take a look. Until then, I don’t want anyone else down in those tunnels.”

The deputy shot Frank and me a hard stare that made it clear that last part was meant for us. He’d been around the Bayport PD long enough to know that we weren’t always the best at listening when Chief Olaf told us not to do something.

“Anyone who ignores me on that is going straight to jail,” he added before turning to Charlene. “That you can quote me on.”

Deputy Hixson handed the big bronze key to another officer. “This broke off when the statue fell. Let’s make sure it gets to whoever’s going to be putting the big guy back together.”

“You know what’s weird?” I said. “It almost looked like the ring that was holding the key had been cut off the Admiral’s belt with a blowtorch. It was a clean cut.”

I took the key from the officer and pointed out the dark spot on the top of the skeleton key where it had been looped onto the ring. “And this burnishing looks a lot like torch marks,” I pointed out.

The deputy waved his hand dismissively. “Probably just a weak point in the metal left over from that restoration a few years ago.”

Sirens blared from across the square as emergency vehicles arrived.

“I’ve got to go. You kids stay away from that sinkhole,” he reminded us sternly before marching off with the other officers.

They’d forgotten to take the key. I slipped it into my gear bag, hoping the Deputy wouldn’t mind if we borrowed it for a while.

“All right, Hardy,” Charlene said to my brother. “Show me what you got.”

“Um, okay, sure,” Frank replied not exactly confidently, turning around his camera and scrolling through the pictures he’d taken. Most of them were snapped before the press conference, with a few pictures of Deputy Hixson speaking. You
could see the look on the deputy’s face change as the ground started shaking. After that there wasn’t much.

“I wasn’t able to get the pic you wanted of Delia Hixson at the press conference because, well, the press conference didn’t last very long,” Frank said sheepishly.

“Yeah, but what about the sinkhole?” Charlene asked. “That’s what everyone is going to want to see now.”

“Well, I guess I was more concerned that everyone was okay. I wasn’t really thinking about pictures,” Frank explained.