The
Boy in the Tunnel
by
17.
If there is no window, build a window. If the room has no
exterior walls, build a tunnel. You must allow light to enter and escape. You
must have something to look out of, or else you will always look inward. You
must look out.
Room 79A was room-locked,
as Drew had feared, and so the hole he made for his window only opened onto a
narrow crawlspace between walls. Build a
tunnel, the Handbook said, and so Drew kept pounding with his hammer, and
found himself in a two-foot-high space under another
room. He crept along in this channel for a while, heavy footsteps creaking
above him, until he came to another wall. The point was to reach the outermost
wall and make a window, because that’s what the Handbook said. Then he’d be
able to see what was outside. Two minutes with the hammer and he could stick
his head through.
He saw a wide chasm,
nearly ten feet between the wall he just broke through and the wall across the
gulf, which from here looked immeasurably deep. This was the end of the tunnel,
for sure.
Except there was a ladder
on the wall directly across from the hole Drew made. It led down into the
chasm, as far as Drew could see. He figured if he made this hole big enough, he
could jump across and catch the ladder, then continue
breaking through from there. He’d get a rope, tie it around his waist when he
jumped, then tie it to the ladder so he’d have something to climb back on. That
sounded like a pretty good plan. The Handbook in his pocket was solid and heavy
on his thigh, and it seemed to agree.
Once the job was done and
Drew was clinging to the ladder, his head swimming with the adrenaline of the
jump, he thought he might as well see what was at the bottom of it before he
continued the tunnel. It only made sense. The Handbook hadn’t mentioned a
ladder, but that didn’t mean he shouldn’t go down it.
Drew climbed down the
iron rungs thirty feet or so until his feet touched concrete. He switched on
his flashlight (he had made his Arrow of Light and was this close to reaching
Eagle Scout when cheerleading got in the way, and “Be Prepared” was still his
motto) and had a look at where he had landed. He was, as he had guessed, in a
narrow defile between the walls; he figured the basement of Wintertree
was probably on the other side of one of the walls. Besides climbing up the
ladder, there were only two paths he could follow. A southpaw, he chose the way
that felt more natural.
The gorge between the
walls continued, curving slightly, for around forty yards, until it ended at a
metal door with a waist-height handicap-accessible push-bar, the kind you’d see
in public high schools or office-building stairwells. Drew pushed open the door
into a musty basement storage room, its floor of concrete and its walls of
painted concrete blocks. The room, maybe 35 feet square, contained nothing but
row after row of bookcases, stacked flush as in a research library; an array of
buttons and levers on the wall next to the door moved the bookcases along their
rails to allow access to their contents.
Drew looked at the
nearest shelf, an orphan from the rest of the stacks. The books were all neatly
arranged, and of identical size and color, and each had the same phrase stamped
in gold on the spine: LIFE MEANS NOTHING TO THE DEAD.
Drew pressed the buttons
and flipped the levers, and more of the bookcases rolled out of the stacks,
exposing their contents. They were all filled with Student Handbooks. Drew took
a random Handbook from its shelf and examined the cover; underneath “
Drew made an educated
guess and pulled another from the shelf: TYLER LEVENTHAL. No, the one next to
it: TIM LEVITT.
There were tens of
thousands of Handbooks in this room—one for every student at UNWG, Drew
reckoned. Drew opened the TIM LEVITT Handbook and flipped through the index to
this listing:
Your roommate (Andrew Boyd),
problems with......342-6
religion and.......123-7
And so on. Drew had
suspected, as of course all UNWG students did, that everyone’s Handbook was
different and unique to its owner, but a fiercely-held taboo prevented all but
the most pathological students from asking to read another’s Handbook, and no
one would ever allow another to read more than a few lines from his or her own
Handbook; stories abounded of couples who, in a moment of misguided tenderness,
shared their Handbooks, to the eventual detriment of both parties. But here,
here was a whole room filled with proof. Drew’s own
Handbook had a similar “Your roommate” listing, but its parentheses contained
the name Tim Levitt. Here, if one was so inclined,
one could find out anything one wanted to know about any other student.
As Drew turned to page
342, a phone rang. Drew dropped the book and looked up—next to the door,
opposite the buttons that operated the stacks, hung a plain white telephone. It
rang again.
*******************
Dick checked his watch.
6:55. Wasn’t this stupid thing supposed to start at
seven? Drew was just completely MIA. If this was the little fag’s idea of a
practical joke, it was not funny at all. Did Drew say he’d meet him there? No
way he was falling for that.
Dick yelled up the ladder
to 79A: “Drew? Let’s get a fucking move on!” No answer from the higher room.
Dick pulled on his collar; it’d been years since he’d been to church, but he
remembered you were supposed to get dressed up. His tie had been dusty when
he’d taken it out of the closet.
Dick hadn’t seen Drew
since Drew interrupted him the other day, and that sat just fine with Dick, but
if they had to go to some retarded worship service together Dick wanted to go
ahead and get it over with. Particularly since going to a tent meeting or
whatever with Drew would earn Dick some trust and so make the Universal Churchology humiliation that much sweeter.
Now that he thought about
it, Dick realized he hadn’t seen any of his roommates in over 24 hours. Not
that he really cared what that weird Tim kid was up to, but they hadn’t crossed
paths in like four days. And Chet last stopped by 79B yesterday morning for a
whole fifteen minutes on his way from somewhere mysterious and to somewhere
even more mysterious. It’s not like they were married or anything, but it’d be
nice to know what was going on in your roommate’s life that was so important,
so maybe you could help out or at least just listen or whatever, plus he needed
to talk with Chet about his Churchology sermon. There
was something just wrong going on, and Dick got that weird heavy feeling in his
shoulders, like somebody was sitting on his neck, the way he used to get last
year before he met Chet, when he was eating supper alone at Weston every night,
three slices of pizza and a cheesesteak because that
at least filled up a part of him.
Goddamn it, Drew. Dick
was going to have to climb up the fucking ladder. “I’m coming up, so put some
fucking pants on,” he yelled, hauling himself up the wooden rungs. His head
crested the floor of 79A and he looked around. Drew wasn’t in there.
“Goddamn it, Drew.” He
started to climb back down and unbutton his collar at the same time, but as his
hand reached for his neck he noticed the hole in the wall between the beds—it
looked like someone had pounded it out with a hammer. Dick forgot about the tie
and pulled himself up into the room.
He crossed the room to
the hole and poked his head through. He saw a crawlspace, then another hole, and
then a little tunnel that looked like the spider-infested space under his porch
back home.
“Drew?” he called out. “You in here?”
*******************
Tim loitered by the
bulletin board near the entrance to Salley Hall,
waiting for Joanie to get out of her late creative-writing
seminar. She hadn’t asked him to meet her here, and he hadn’t mentioned it to
her; she hadn’t even told him she had a class at this time in this place, and
Tim couldn’t remember how he had found out. But it seemed like the right thing
to do. He hadn’t even returned to his room until four in the morning last
night, and when he woke up at eight Drew wasn’t there and there was a giant
hole punched in the wall. No time to worry about stuff like that.
Tim distractedly perused
the notices on the board. TEACH ENGLISH IN
Tim scanned back up the
column of tacked-up flyers. TIM YOUR PRESENCE IS REQUESTED TONIGHT 10 PM PG 299.
The paper was yellowing and overlapped by other flyers. It had been here a
while. Tim looked up and down the hall—empty. The only sound was the muffled
voice of someone haltingly reading Shakespeare from behind a closed classroom
door. Tim figured What
the hell? and opened his Handbook to page 299.
The administration and faculty of UNWG believe in a solid liberal-arts education for all
students, regardless of major; it was the dream of our founder Anthony Delmonico—a dream that continues to the present day-- that
the botanist and the economist find common ground in the appreciation of fine
art or the universal language of poetry. And as for the artists and poets
themselves, the curriculum is designed to give them a firm grounding in the
history of their disciplines. The budding poet or musician, for instance, may
admire the folk-musical stylings of Bob Dylan or Joan
Baez, but at UNWG he will also find inspiration in the great tradition of
English folk balladry, such as these verses, a favorite of President Delmonico’s:
'Gae hame,
gae hame, good brother
John,
To come an' lift her noble lord,
Who 's sleepin' sound on Yarrow.'
'Yestreen I dream'd
a dolefu' dream;
I dream'd I pu'd the heather green,
On the dowie banks o'
Yarrow.'
She gaed up yon high, high hill—
An' in a den spied nine dead men,
On the dowie houms o' Yarrow.
Despite the seemingly
random quoting of a 17th-century ballad, Tim grasped the meaning
clear enough. Yarrow Hall sat across the West Campus quad from McHolden House, a squat red brick building whose purpose
Tim had never been sure of.
Tim ripped the flyer from
the bulletin board and stuffed it in his pocket. Joanie
would have to wait. Something bigger was happening here.
The Nine Dead Men had summoned him.
© 2005 Gardner Linn