“Yes, yes, of course.”
“One purpose of the tunnels is to take runoff as well.”
“Runoff?”
“Water from the lake during bad weather, sir, so that any overflow is run away from the Midway and the pavilions.”
“Aye…so no one at the fair should be inconvenienced. Wouldn’t want anyone getting her Buster Browns wet.”
“It’s a complicated system, but it has to do with the creation of the lagoon.”
“Of course, of course.” Alastair again cursed the fact that the man most knowledgeable in all this was out of the country. He’d even tried to locate the man’s assistant on the project and his foreman, but not too surprising everyone “responsible” for the fair had abandoned the city for some peace.
In a month or two, the fair would be shut down permanently.
“You will be careful, Inspector, as there is a storm brewing overhead,” said the guard when they both heard rumblings of thunder.
“Who mans the gates on the locks controlling the water?” asked Ransom. “I certainly have no desire to drown down here.”
“Actually, sir, no one mans the gates.”
“What do you mean, no one-”
“The marvels of modern technology at work, sir.”
“You mean, they open automatically when the lake rises to a certain level?”
“Aye, sir.”
“I see.” Ransom sighed heavily, turned and started down the tunnel he had chosen, the largest of the three, wondering if Behan and Logan were as well informed as he, and wondering if both or either would balk at this game when faced with the enormity of it all. “Look, those vents, are they large enough for a full-grown man to clamber down into?” he asked the guard where he turned for a final look out into the safe confines of the sub-basement.
“They are indeed, but wire mesh prevents-”
“And are there such vents in all three networks?”
“There are, sir.”
“I see, then there well could be people living down here.”
“If so, their eyes will have adjusted to the lack of light.” The guard indicated the police lamp in Ransom’s hand. “They’ll know you’re approaching well in advance.”
He cut down the intensity of the lamp by controlling the window. “I’ll not stumble about in pitch dark,” he said and ambled down the subterranean corridor with its wet, earthen walls lathered as if sweating, breathing, reflecting the light. Ransom thought it looked like a lot of his nightmares, like he’d stepped into the maw of Hell itself. The floor here added to his disorientation as it was on a gradual incline that increased with each step.
The reflected lamplight off the stone floor glowed copper red and blood orange. Perhaps I am on the path to Hell, he thought.
Not far from Alastair another tunnel wall radiated off in another direction and in it Jedidiah Logan slowly descended. He too had heard the rumblings of an imminent storm out in the world overhead, as it reverberated underground, making him feel as if he were inside a drum or a human heart when his police lamp turned the walls a garish purple-red hue. Silly, he told himself. Steady.
For a long stretch of his search, his light held before him, Logan thought of how little he had upstairs in the world both at the office and at home. He felt an overwhelming loneliness creeping in with the dampness here, and he wondered if he were to die tonight, if anyone in Chicago would care, and further if anyone at all would recall his name or his face.
He’d had poor luck all his life with making friends of a lasting nature, especially with women. Yes, he was married but theirs was a childless marriage and a loveless one at that. He and Molly simply tolerated one another’s existence in the cramped quarters of their small apartment. She took in washing, and he brought home a cop’s salary. Not much to show for a life, he was thinking; then he thought how she’d give him hell if he came home with muck and grime on his pants or coat, and here he was faced with wading in brackish water that looked only deeper ahead. He saw no way around it, if he were to do a thorough job here. Else he could lie to Alastair and tell him he’d done the job, but Ransom was observant; he’d notice if he returned too clean. Molly be damned, he told himself and started into the ankle deep water, black and shiny as oil against his lamplight.
Two steps farther and he could not understand how the water had seeped through his shirt and coat at his abdomen. Out of nowhere came a thick wetness smelling of acrid copper, and it struck him that his stomach was in pain, aching.
His legs still continued ahead, but he felt a sudden faintness. At first, he thought it some sort of annoying stomach problem, but the immediate wetness, like pissing himself on a drunk, struck him as so odd as this was at his abdomen, while the wetness only increased. Trouble like a rupture. He held tight to the lantern like a lifeline with his right hand, while his left investigated the cause of the wetness. His left hand hit the strange hilt of a knife sticking from his gut, and this came as a surprise, like finding something completely out of place. He’d not heard it fly into him; he had not felt it slice through his coat, and a part of his mind refused to believe it’d happened.
It makes no sense, and yet it made all the sense, he thought, not realizing he’d gone to his knees, his legs having buckled.
Still Jedidiah held firm to the lantern. In fact, some mad notion inside his dying brain had his hands tearing at the lantern, ripping apart its metal casing to get at the kerosene screw nut, tear it open and with the flame taking on the fumes and kerosene licking the surface of the water around him, Logan covered himself in fire, choosing his death by fire, refusing to allow the dirty bastard who’d knifed him the pleasure of saying his blade had killed Jedidiah Logan.
Logan began screaming this but it was unintelligible by now, his clothing and body covered in licking flames. His burning form created a ball of light and fire that illuminated the grime-covered faces of his killers. Five pairs of eyes watched his body finally fall facedown, snuffing the flames in his fall. The broken lantern had wheeled away and once more the corridor was thrown into darkness.
Amid the pitch black crept people wading through the water toward Logan’s body. The man who had wielded the knife, followed by a woman in rags, and she followed by three voracious children of varying ages. The woman and her children attacked Logan’s remains, taking whatever clothing and jewelry that might be useful, ripping away burnt and useless clothing, finally getting down to the bare back and gleefully, as in a ritual of pleasure, all of them began stabbing repeatedly.
With Logan beyond dead, and with the initial excitement of the kill over, the cannibals began cutting away fleshy portions of Jedidiah Logan’s corpse. Logan was the largest prey the family had ever brought down…so far.
Inspector Ken Behan had not gotten sixty yards down his tunnel when he decided to hell with it, that he was going no farther until he could bring a small army of men with him, and that what Alastair and Logan had decided with little to no input from him was in effect madness. Besides, he thought he’d heard something vibrating through the walls of his tunnel, sounds like those of a man crying out in pain.
In his head, he tried to understand how so muffled a sound could reverberate through rock walls here in the curiously damp, black hole he stood in. The damn lantern he had was threatening to go out as well. Some kind of malfunction. This alone seemed good enough excuse to return to the museum, and why not?
Behan thought of his wife and kids; imagined what their lives would be without him. He started back for the light at the end of the tunnel, the one that marked his entry.
As he neared the place where he had begun, he saw the guard looking down the corridor at him, and it made him feel as if he were in an endless, bottomless shaft that could turn into a labyrinth inside of which, if a man became lost, he might never surface. He panicked for a moment, thinking, what if the guard, for whatever reason, is going to close and lock that door against me?