“Wait!” said Calvin. He dashed, scaling the fence as he scrambled toward the pipe. He couldn’t imagine that old man climbing over. Then he saw a disturbed portion of fence, a thatch at the bottom that had been clipped and curled like the lid of a sardine can.
Before kneeling onto the ground and slipping through the fence, Calvin glanced at the pipe. The old man was gone. Calvin cursed and then dropped to his belly and slid through the opening.
On the other side, Calvin was faced with a gradual incline of dirt that met the concrete ditch. The sides of the ditch were sun bleached and dry. Calvin had no trouble maneuvering his way down. The trickle of water running through the center of the ditch was a sluice of green algae, rotting leaves and dirt.
The pipe the old man had walked into was about five feet tall and illuminated by a series of trouble and Christmas lights strung together with extension chords. The generator must have been hidden somewhere far enough within the system of pipes that Calvin couldn’t hear it.
He stood there at the edge of the tunnel deciding whether or not he wanted to go through with this. There was no indicator that he was in the right place, no sign on the side of the tunnel wall, no one to greet him except for the old man, and he could be a hobo for all Calvin knew.
The idea that Calvin could be walking into a trap occurred to him again, and then Mr. Ghastly’s voice blossomed in his mind like a corpse flower and everything was all right.
“Come on, Calvin. Don’t be afraid. Nothing in here you haven’t seen before.”
Calvin glanced toward the parking lot hoping to see someone else arriving who had a flyer like the one in his pocket, but nobody was there. He was going to have to do this on his own.
He stepped into the dank drainage pipe. It smelled faintly of sewage and mold. He walked as much in the center as he could without walking in the thin trail of grease-slick algae. Above was a universe of cobwebs, some hanging so low he had to shift to avoid running into them. He couldn’t see any spiders, but they had to be there somewhere. These webs didn’t make themselves. Calvin wasn’t a fan of arachnids. He’d conquer a common house spider like a man, but when it came to a black or a brown widow his knees went weak.
To put thoughts of poisonous spiders out of his mind, he thought about the prize at the end of this tunnel. Calvin didn’t even know what to expect, but as long as there were lights to follow, he would continue.
At one point he turned back and almost felt a wave of claustrophobia when he realized that the tunnel had been gradually turning and he could no longer see the opening. He hadn’t gone all that far yet, but it felt like he was halfway to El Cajon.
Soon enough he came to a series of three openings. Two of them were dark, empty chasms. They could go on for miles or drop twenty feet. The opening straight ahead was lined from one side of the floor to the other in an arch of blindingly bright lights that resembled flashbulbs in some agonizing perpetual flash. He thought of Caroline’s mother in Poltergeist saying, “Do not go into the light.”
Even using his arms to shield his eyes from the intense illumination, Calvin was unable to see anything beyond the bright white brilliance. After a moment of hesitation, he closed his eyes, ignored Caroline’s mother, and walked into the light.
The chamber beyond the brightly lit opening was large with a comfortable ceiling height. It was the central drainage corridor that ran beneath Wintergardens Avenue. The floor was wet, but not slick like the center of the pipe he’d just emerged from. Claustrophobic thoughts of what would happen in the event of a sudden downpour occurred to Calvin, but he was too awestruck to care. It wasn’t as if there would be a sudden downpour in San Diego anyway.
There were three openings like the one Calvin had come through. One had words in red painted above it: Photo Gallery, and another with the words, in all caps: FREAK SHOW, and the third said: Death’s Door.
Was that in reference to the movie or was that some kind of entrance to the reaper’s lair, to a room with a blood-slick operating table and an array of torture implements adorning the walls, the sharp and blunt edges alike crusted in the blood of any number of victims? Step up to Death’s Door, folks, right this way. The reaper is waiting for you—admit one: soul for the taking.
“First time?” The voice drew Calvin away from the many dark avenues his mind had been traveling.
A woman stood there with a sickly smile painted up in lipstick as black as squid ink. Her eyes were outlined in so much eyeliner she looked half dead, yet Calvin had to admit that beneath the gothic veneer she had a strange sort of beauty.
Calvin stammered, “Uh, yeah, first time here. This is the Hall of Hell, right?”
She giggled. “What else?”
Calvin looked over the room again noting that there weren’t a whole lot of people there. Maybe they were in the three chambers. Maybe this absurd party was that exclusive.
“How about you?” Calvin said. “You been here before?”
“My first time too. You want a drink? There’s a ghoulish looking guy in the corner acting as bartender, but they don’t have much of a selection.”
She gestured toward a dark corner of the chamber where a man who could have been an old beatnik refugee sat behind a small foldout table with an even smaller assortment of bottles and a bucket of ice next to little clear plastic cups like those found in cheap motels.
“I could use a drink,” Calvin said.
He and the girl walked over to the slack-eyed man at the makeshift bar. The guy looked up at Calvin, his eyes hiding beneath a gray golfer’s cap. He had what once was a strong jaw that now had the deflated look that a toothless maw could account for. “Have a drink?” he asked.
Calvin scrunched up his face all non-committal. “What do you got?”
“We got some shit domestic beer in that cooler by yer feet, couple of bottles of the hard stuff here on the table—on the rocks if you like it that way. Not much for cocktails, you know.” He grabbed a slender bottle of dark blue glass with a white skull and crossbones painted on it. It was corked with a decorative skull. “But there’s one drink preferred by the Gorehounds. Know what that is?”
Calvin decided that saying no was better than asking whether he was referring to the Gorehounds (whatever that was) or the drink.
The bartender grinned like the Crypt-Keeper from the old EC comics. “A Helldahyde. Want one?”
“What is it?”
“Whiskey on ice with a jigger of formaldehyde.”
Calvin grimaced. “You shittin’ me?”
The bartender just stared at him like his damaged neurons were malfunctioning.
Calvin was about to ask the woman he met what she was drinking, but she was gone.
“Sure, whatever, I’ll have a hellda-whatever-you-call-it.”
“Helldahyde.”
As the bartender prepared the drink, Calvin absorbed the diminutive room. The walls were made of concrete and huge pipes. There was strange music coming out of one of the rooms, dark and melodic from what sounded like a wind instrument. Maybe Pan’s pipes.
“’ere,” said the bartender.
Calvin grabbed the drink and was about to walk away when he realized that he hadn’t left a tip much less paid for the drink.