The Tunnels
Faulkner understood the irony of his current job. Since his childhood years he’d dreamt of the underground, fear filled dreams of sweat and dirt and the sickening feeling of the last sliver of the blue sky he’d ever see. He would awake gasping for breath and in the following days, would refuse to enter any space he deemed “too small”. Any space that gave him that shiver, that made him think of entombment. The claustrophobia lessened as he grew older, the dreams slowing as real life took precedence over irritational fears. Yet even through all those years, Faulkner always kept a promise to himself. To never step foot underground.
Now here he stood. The foreman of his construction team, staring at the open trap door in the ground that gaped up at him like the maw of some mocking beast.
“It’s not just a cellar,” Gabriel popped out of the trapdoor like a gopher. His hard hat wobbled slightly on his sweaty forehead, and he raised a gloved hand to adjust it.
“What is it then?” Faulkner had been disgruntled enough to find the trapdoor and the hole beneath it. He’d hoped it had just been a hidden cellar underneath the rotten old buildings they’d torn down just yesterday.
“Tunnels.”
“Tunnels?”
“That’s what it looked like,” Gabriel pointed East, “Looked they ran that way. At least one did; I didn’t go too far on accounting of time, but there were a few offshoots.”
Faulkner scratched his beard. They’d been hired by a local housing company who’d just bought land to throw up a hasty apartment complex. The land had stood empty for years, holding just a few ramshackle building and scrub trees. Faulkner couldn’t see why the company wanted their apartments here, but they did, and they wanted them built fast. The tunnels would make a fast construction near impossible.
“Ought we to worry about the tunnels weakening the foundation?” Gabriel asked, still in the hole. The more Faulkner thought about it, the more Gabriel reminded him of a gopher. But that gopher was his right-hand man and best worker.
“Yeah, we ought,” Faulkner said slowly. With their time constraint, mapping the tunnels and testing the ground’s integrity could chew up days they didn’t have.
“Let me think a second,” Faulkner turned to survey the construction site. The rest of the crew had left about an hour ago, past six. Faulkner and Gabriel had been walking away too when Gabriel had tripped over the edge of the trap door. Both men were too curious to leave it until the next day. Now Faulkner wished they had.
The old debris had been cleared from the site, replaced now by fresh stacks of boards wrapped in their tarps and the yellow bodies of the heavy equipment that caught the sun’s last light. And the sun. It approached the trees now, casting long shadows that threatened to turn to darkness within an hour or two. Faulkner didn’t like the parallels. Faulkner also didn’t like to rush things.
“Alright,” he looked back to Gabriel, “It’s getting dark; you take a radio and a flashlight and see what you can find down there, but don’t be longer than thirty minutes. No reason to make you stay later than everyone else.”
“It’ll be faster if we both go,” Gabriel pointed out, “Besides I trust your judgement better than mine when it comes to the integrity of the tunnels.”
“I’ll be down too,” Faulkner hedged, “I’m gonna shoot the company a line, tell them we’ll need a little more time. I’m hoping that the tunnels will come to a dead end within a minute or two.”
Gabriel shrugged and disappeared back into the earth. Faulkner felt a creep of guilt but shrugged it off as he walked back to his truck. There were perks to being the foreman of a team, and Gabriel didn’t mind anyway.
He had just logged on to his work computer when the radio on his shoulder crackled and Gabriel’s voice came through,
“No dead end yet, boss. There’s a few offshoots but I’m staying in the main one.”
“That’s alright; don’t get lost,” Faulkner returned into the radio. It didn’t take him more than a minute or two to send the building company an email informing them of the developments, but he stayed sitting in his truck even after it had sent. He’d seen some of the other men hang pictures of their wives or children in their trucks to look at when they were on a long job. He kind of wished he had one of those pictures to look at now. But he remembered, as he always did, how difficult it was to never be home on time. To always have to make that call and cancel a date, or say goodnight when he knew he wouldn’t see her again till three days later. It hadn’t worked then, and it wouldn’t work now.
“Okay boss?”
Faulkner quickly jumped out of his truck, as though embarrassed to be having the kind of natural thoughts that any lonely man would have.
“What’s up?” Faulkner put a hand on his radio and started back to the site.
“There’s something pretty weird in these tunnels.”
“Like what?
The radio crackled for a moment before Gabriel spoke again,
“The tunnels started out as dirt, but they turned to rock about ten feet in-”
“Rock?” Faulkner stopped walking, “Who the hell bothered to tunnel through rock?”
“Well, there’s some petroglyph looking things painted on the walls,” Gabriel continued, “This one in particular, someone liked this weird looking bear-like thing with big eyes and long arms. He’s everywhere.”
“Okay, I don’t like this Gabriel,” Faulkner shook his head, “I don’t want to tread on any toes here. We’ll leave it for tonight and have someone come out this week to date it and see if we need to shut the site down for an archeological dig.”
“There’s no way it’s that old; I mean it was right under a trap-door. People must know about this.”
“I don’t care, we could get in serious trouble for messing with it if it’s even remotely historical,” Faulkner crouched next to the hole and waited for Gabriel’s response. He had to be about ten minutes in at this point, Faulkner couldn’t even see the glow of his flashlight from inside.
“Gabriel,” he spoke again into the radio, “Come on, we’ll do this in the daylight.”
“Are you down here?” Gabriel asked, the static nearly drowning his words. Faulkner frowned,
“No, I’m right here up top.”
“What?”
“I said I’m up top. Come on back up.”
“Oh my God.”
“Now what?”
Gabriel’s voice had dropped to a hoarse whisper when he eventually spoke again,
“I think someone else is down here.”
Someone probably was. Someone was probably hiding around a corner, waiting for Gabriel to leave so they could get back to exploring.
“I don’t-” Gabriel broke off suddenly and all Faulkner could hear was that deafening static.
“Gabe? Come on man,” Faulkner lowered the radio and glanced down into the hole. Still no sign of his flashlight. The radio crackled to life again and heavy breaths came through it, as though Gabriel had been running and all Faulkner could catch of words was a repeated prayer.
“Gabe what are you doing?” Faulkner wanted to be irritated but he felt a sense of foreboding begin to blanket his senses. He’d never heard Gabriel pray before. Gabriel wasn’t religious.
“Close it! Close the door! Lock it!” Gabriel’s tones rose to a shriek, loud enough that Faulkner dropped the radio. He could hear screaming now, not from the radio but from somewhere inside the tunnels themselves. Horrific grating screams of a pitch that Faulkner had never heard in his life and prayed he would never hear again. Swearing under his breath he picked up the radio again,
“Gabe! Gabriel! We’re professionals man, don’t play jokes on company time!”
His hand gripped the radio, knuckles white as he waited for Gabriel’s sheepish apology. The radio stayed silent. The entire world felt eerily quiet now that the screaming had stopped. No wind nor birds nor distant car engines broke the reverie. Not until the footsteps came.
They grew closer in the tunnels, scuffling and quick and not guided by any flashlight. Faulkner gripped his own flashlight and decided he would stomach the underground long enough to lay into Gabriel for wasting company time by playing the kind of pranks suitable for children. Resting a hand on the open trap door, he hopped down and landed on soft dirt, feeling suddenly wrapped in the overwhelming smell of the earth, mulchy and thick and not unnecessarily unpleasant. The footsteps seemed to stop somewhere in front of Faulkner, and he noticed an abrupt new smell, a sickly honeyed stench. Remembering his flashlight, he scrambled to turn it on and pointed it where he’d been sure he would see a grinning Gabriel.
The light illuminated a stretch of tunnel, empty. He could see as far as when the walls shifted from dirt to rock and where they narrowed into a width no more than two feet. Shadows showed where other tunnels shot off into the black underground, but nowhere could Faulkner see Gabriel.
An old feeling of horror, one not felt since his childhood, began to drag a cold finger along his spine. Faulkner braced himself with a hand on the wall, the dirt shifting through his fingers to pool at his feet. Above, the ceiling rested just inched over his head. He looked over his shoulder at the opening of the trap door, showing that faint blue of the sky just before sunset. And the footsteps started again. This time they came from one of the offshoots, the same quick shuffle that Faulkner now, too late, knew didn’t belong to his friend and coworker.
