The Boy in the Tunnel

by Gardner Linn

44.

Dick had never been inside Mary Rutherford. Never even been invited. His brief relationships with Sandra and Hilary hadn’t progressed to the stage in which his presence in their bedrooms was required.

“I don’t think I’m supposed to be here,” he whispered. Whispering felt like the thing to do. “NO MALE VISITORS 10 PM – 8 AM” was stapled in diecut letters on a bulletin board.

“You’re with me. Official school business.” Charlie led him to the stairs at the end of the empty hall. Dick could hear snatches of soft music and muffled voices behind closed doors. Each one led to a Narnia that he had never been allowed access to. He was almost too old.

Dick followed Charlie up two flights of stairs to the third floor. “I’ve got to blindfold you now.”

“What?”

“You can’t see how to get where we’re going.”

Dick looked around the hall. There didn’t seem to be too many options. “Whatever.”

Charlie pulled a black cloth from her purse and tied it over Dick’s eyes. She took his hand, and he was distracted from any attempts he might have made to memorize the number, length and direction of steps to their destination by the unnatural coldness of Charlie’s slender fingers.

Forty-five seconds later, Charlie removed Dick’s blindfold, and he found himself standing almost exactly where he had been standing when last he had sight. “Did we just go in a circle?”

“Sure,” said Charlie. The hall wasn’t the same as the one he was just in, Dick realized—it was the same, architecturally, but there were no signs of occupancy. No sounds of showers or the Dave Mathews Band, no nametags or double-entendre-filled dry-erase boards on the doors.

Except one. The third door on the left was adorned with a single sheet of white paper with the name “MOLLY” spelled out on it in purple glitter. Charlie walked to this door and knocked on it. It opened, and she and Dick stepped inside.

***************

“Julian?”

Julian only had one sheet of paper left. He tore it in half, then half again, then again. Should have done this with all the sheets. He drew an arrow on one of the eighths and taped it to the wall.

“Julian?”

The voice had been following him for probably fifteen minutes now. It was the voice he had heard before, the wild voice, the spectral cry of a lost child. It seemed designed to frighten him, but its owner, if one existed, remained hidden, and so Julian simply let the voice become a part of the soundtrack to his exploration of the tunnels.

“Julian?”

He hadn’t found any more rooms like his little office, as he had come to think of it, only endless forking tunnels. He thought he’d been going in circles, but he hadn’t run back across any of his signposts. The tunnels had to lead somewhere; that was the whole point of tunnels. A maze without a solution isn’t a maze at all.

“Julian?”

“Yeah, it’s me,” Julian said. His voice sounded strange echoing off the concrete walls of the tunnel, too loud and too rough, the voice of someone just learning to speak. “What do you want?”

The voice didn’t answer. Julian taped another arrow at a fork in the tunnel. Six squares of paper left. Probably have to head back soon. “Don’t suppose you want to tell me which way to go?” he asked the walls. The walls only parroted his question back at him.

Julian walked down the tunnel to the left of the fork. After about twenty yards he started to notice a gradual lightening of the gloom (the tunnels had never been completely dark, nor had they been light enough to see more than a foot or so ahead); the texture of the concrete blocks that formed the walls was visible, as were a few instances of graffiti: a sloppy King Milo and, a few yards past it, the question “WHO KNOWS EVERYBODY’S NAME?” Both were written in a dark red substance, almost black, dried and flaking off the wall.

The light grew stronger as Julian continued down the tunnel. The tunnel became a physical place, real and therefore manageable, not the unknowable abstraction it had been for however long he had been down here. Julian’s walk became a limping trot. He yearned for the light; he wanted light so bright it made darkness fictional. He ran for what seemed like hours, the light growing brighter by the second, until he came to the source. He stopped at a wall, a dead end, with a single flickering fluorescent tube on the ceiling above. The wall displayed more graffiti. “JUST WAIT A SECOND,” it read. “SOMEONE WILL BE RIGHT WITH YOU.”

*************

“Ah! Welcome, my dear Celestial.” Anthony offered Sarah a glass of brandy and ushered her to a chair near the fire.

“I told you not to call me that.”

“My apologies. Old habits die hard. I would inquire as to the purpose of your visit, but I have more pressing news. We have a visitor.”

“A visitor?”

Anthony pulled a silk rope next to his chair, and a bell tinkled in an adjacent room. Presently the ancient gentleman in black entered, leading a bound and blindfolded young man. Anthony nodded to his gentleman, who pulled the blindfold off the man’s head with the satisfying thwip of expensive cloth. The young man blinked, adjusting to the orange glow of the room.

“The fuck?”

The guy looked familiar to Sarah, but then again, every guy at UNWG looked familiar to her. Though this guy looked older—maybe 25—and had thick, tattooed forearms protruding from his black t-shirt. Musician arms. Probably a drummer. Sarah’d had plenty of mind-numbingly boring opportunities to create a taxonomy of band guys during her time with Shawn.

“Dude what the hell is going on—“ The guy’s eyes landed on Sarah. “Hey, don’t I know you?”

“What is your name?” said Anthony.

“I’m just hallucinating you. Awesome. That’s just what Shawn said would happen.”

“Excuse me?” There’s no way the guy just said “Shawn,” Sarah thought. That would just be insane.

“Hallucinations don’t get to ask questions. That’s one of the first things you learn. Any questions you ask me are just questions I’m asking myself. And I don’t want to ask any questions.” The drummer’s wrists strained against the rope holding them together in front of his oversized Pabst Blue Ribbon belt buckle. “Yo, chief, come untie my hands.”

Anthony smiled at the drummer. Sarah’d seen that smile before. It was the smile a cat got when it saw something amusing, something it could play with and then devour. “Certainly,” Anthony said. “If you tell me your name.”

“Why not? Patrick.”

Anthony opened a drawer on the sideboard that held the decanters and glassware and pulled out a long silver knife, an instrument for disburdening a fish of its innards. “Hold still,” he said, his eyes dark slits above ballooning jovial cheeks, “Patrick.”

A brief sawing of silver upon hemp, and Patrick’s hands were free. “Thanks, man,” he said. “What’s your name?”

Anthony replaced the knife in the drawer. “My name is Patrick also.”

“No kidding.”

“And she is Patrick as well,” Anthony said, pointing at Sarah. “For we are merely manifestations of that great pudding in your skull, are we not?”

“Yeah, sure. You must be the part that likes to eat.”

Anthony’s smile grew so large his eyes disappeared. “Oh ho! Quite impertinent, but I must admit I rarely ignore the dinner bell.” Anthony gestured toward the chairs facing the fire. “Tell me, Patrick, would you like to play a game? I so rarely receive gentleman visitors. And the womenfolk, lovely though they may be, have not the wit for the pursuits I most enjoy.” Anthony winked conspiratorially at Patrick, and the two sat down, leaving Sarah to try to remember just what she came here for in the first place.

© 2007 Gardner Linn