This was a short story that I wrote about a year ago for one of my final Creative Classes. It's one of the few short stories I'm particularly proud of, although I'm not a big fan of the ending these days. Perhaps I'll revisit it in the future. Anyway, I hope you enjoy it.
-MC
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"The World Below"
By Matthew Ciarvella
Nobody alive today remembers the old subway tunnel under the bridge on Broad Street. It used to be part of the Erie Canal, but that was an even longer time ago, or so our father told us, back during the lazy summer days of late July when the plant would close and we'd sit out in the backyard under a shady tree with beers that we weren't old enough to drink, but did anyway. First, it was a canal, he'd said, and then later, it was a subway, and then it was nothing at all, just a tunnel that ran under the entire city like an empty vein. Parts of it had collapsed over the years, and one time, it took out an entire section of Broad Street and killed an old lady who was walking her dog. Or maybe it killed a taxi driver who stopped to have a smoke, or a bike messenger, or a hundred other different people, or nobody, depending who was telling you the story.
We grew up hearing stories of that old tunnel, even though nobody knew how to get in, or how much of it was left. The section that collapsed was filled in after the accident, but you'd still hear stories about people finding old stairways in their basements that led down into the tunnel. But nobody really knew and so it was just this place that we all knew but never saw, had all heard about but only in stories. Kids ran away to live down there, winos carved out shitty little homes there, and some people (stupid fucking idiots, my father would say) would go down there to play at being explorers and were never seen again.
It's Sunday afternoon, and I'm making soup, or maybe stew, I'm not really sure yet. I'm interacting with bits of beef and vegetables in what I imagine to be a stern and authoritative way. Kyle's in the den, which is also the living room, watching something on our shitty little TV, when I hear him say that Ricky Jankis told him the secret to getting into the old tunnel. It hits us both, simultaneously, that this is an opportunity to do something never done, something that you simply didn't do.
"So let's go do it," I say.
"We'll do it later this week," he says. But I know that's the same as not doing it.
"Why not now?" I say. "Look, it can't be that hard. We'll just need flashlights, our boots, and maybe some rope."
"What the hell would we need rope for?" he asks. "You don't even know how to climb with rope."
"Neither do you," I argue.
"Yeah, but I'm not the one suggest we need a fucking rope in the first place."
He's right, I don't actually know how to use a rope for climbing, so I drop the issue. But I still want to get the other things, the supplies for what I already know is going to be, "one goddamn awesome adventure."
"Damn right," Kyle agrees and then disappears upstairs for several minutes. I wait at the foot of the stairs impatiently, filling my backpack with a couple of flashlights, my old Boy Scout knife, and a few of water bottles.
Kyle returns a few minutes later. "Check it out," he says with a grin. He has Dad's old .44 revolver that he carried back when he was a cop.
"What the hell are you doing with that?" I ask.
"What?" he asks defensively, as he loops Dad's holster through his belt and tightens it. "You don't know what's going to be down there. If we're doing this, I'm want to make sure I'm ready for anything." He checks the magazine and then holsters the revolver. "Don't be jealous just because I'm packing heat and you're not."
"I'm not," I say. "I'm not jealous." But that's not true, and we both know it. It's just one more thing about today that's forbidden, one more taboo that we're going to break.
"Fine," I say as I shoulder my backpack. "But I'm driving."
"Fine with me," he says.
I pull into an empty gravel parking lot and park my truck. Despite the hot, humid summer air, my skin feels clammy as I climb out of my truck and grab my backpack out of the bed. Across from me, Kyle grins as he checks the gun on his hip, then grabs a flashlight.
"Follow me," he says.
I follow him across the gravel parking lot towards Broad Street. From here, I can see the churning brown water of the Genesee River as it rushes past us. From here, the Broad Street bridge looks like something out of a horror novel; a series of arches support the road as it spans the mighty Genesee.
"Okay, smart guy," I say to Kyle. "How do we get there from here?"
Kyle points to the series of arches. "You see how above the main arch, there's a row of smaller arches below the street?"
I nod.
"Ricky Jankis told me that's the subway, right there. All we need to do is climb up from the river bank and we can get into the tunnel from there."
I eye the distance from the riverbank to the bridge. "How the hell are we supposed to climb that?" I ask.
Kyle laughs. "You're right, maybe we should have brought some of your fucking rope." He points to the end of the bridge. "It shouldn't be too hard of a climb if we go at it from the road. We'll just climb down. It'll be easy."
Yeah, right. Easy. Just as long as nobody slips. As long as nobody sees a couple of idiot teenagers, one carrying a gun, climbing past the obvious "no trespassing signs" posted everywhere. As long as neither of us slip and get dropped into the river.
I look back at the churning brown water. For the first time that day, I really wish I hadn't let Kyle talk me out of bringing my goddamn rope.
We try to act as though we know what we're doing as we approach the bridge. It doesn't work, though, and I feel beads of sweat collect on my back that have nothing to do with the heat of the humid summer day. Kyle reaches the bridge and looks around.
"Let's do this," he says, and then swings his leg over the side and disappears.
"Oh shit," I hear him cry out, and I lunge forward, pressing my hands into the rusted metal to look over the side.
"What? What happened?"
He's fifteen feet down, on his ass on the narrow stone lip. He looked up at me with an angry expression. "I fucking slipped, what does it look like? Careful, that's crazy slippery."
I glance around one more time, but there's nobody else on the bridge. Nobody to talk me out of what I already know is going to be a bad idea. But nobody's ever accused me of listening to common sense, and I know if I take any more time, I'll have to put up with Kyle's crap.
Moving carefully, I swing my leg over the side of the bridge, and start my descent. The bridge is old and crumbly, with several empty hollows for me to dig my hands and feet into. It's not much help, though, because everything is covered in slick mud. Ten feet above the stone lip, my feet slide out from under me, and I nearly pitch backward into the river.
"Shit shit shit shit," I snarl as I claw at the bricks. I manage to keep myself from falling.
Barely.
"Almost there!" Kyle calls out. "If you let go, you'll get here even faster!"
"Keep talking, smartass," I growl. "That way I can make sure I'll land on you."
He laughs and I continue my slow climb, swearing each time I put my foot against a mud slick brick.
Finally, my harrowing, rope-less climb is over and Kyle and I are standing under the arch, with the bridge above us, the river below us, and a dank opening before us.
The first thing I notice is the smell. It's some strange mix of damp earth, wet leaves, and shit. My hands and jeans are already covered in mud from the climb down. Kyle doesn't look much better.
"Can't believe I thought this was a good idea," I say, but my brother doesn't hear me. Kyle's already climbing through the arch, descending the last few feet to the dirt of the subway tunnel. I follow him to the sound of a car passing over our heads.
Graffiti and garbage are everywhere. Light passes through the arches in front of us, creating a lattice of shadows that finally ends at the far end of the bridge. There, the open darkness of the old subway tunnel waits quietly to embrace us.
Kyle looks back at me, and despite all of my earlier anxieties, I can't help but grin at him. "This is going to be awesome," he says. I pull out a pair of flashlights and hand one to him.
"Let's get to it," I say.
If you're from the city like me, you don't know what dark really is. Sure, you think you know, you can define it, you can use it in a sentence. Dark is the opposite of light. Dark is what happens when the sun goes down. Dark is your closet at night or the open basement door before you grope for the light switch.
But that's not really dark. Not really.
We'd gone maybe a few hundred feet. At first, we were able to see without the flashlights thanks to the thin strands of light that leaked in through the arches of the aqueduct. There was a lot of graffiti on every surface. Mostly it just looks like one big messy blur, with each new splotch of spray-painted initials slopped over the previous. But every now and then, there is a really impressive job that somebody would have done, that the other graffitists didn't cover with scrawled initials or cuss words.
I wondered if there was some kind of code of conduct for people like that, people who spent their time writing "shit" and "fuck" and "south street Crips 4 LIFE" on the walls of an old subway.
One of the messages, just before it got dark, was actually pretty funny.
"Hey, look at this," Kyle said and pointed with his light. We were getting to the point where we really needed them.
He shined his light on a mournful message that was scrawled across the entire ceiling of the tunnel.
Sometimes, the graffitist wrote in stylish script, I'm just too tired to touch myself.
"Amen, brother," Kyle said.
I looked at my brother for a moment and shook my head in dismay, and we kept going.
That was about the point when the subway tunnel curved off to the side, following the contour of Broad Street back up in there in the world above. And that's when things got dark, as the curve swallowed up the tiny bits of light from the arches, and we found ourselves standing in a darkness deeper and more complete than anything I'd ever known, with only the thin, shaky beams of a couple of cheap flashlights to keep the encroaching blackness at bay.
Everything smells even more strongly here, the smells of garbage and dust and old concrete. I look back and forth with my light and see a world of broken walls, rusting pipes, broken train tracks. It is a different world than the one I know.
The city above felt like it's a million miles away, as far away as the moon. We might as well be on another planet.
"Turn your light off," I say.
"What?" Kyle's voice echoes slightly. He's gone down a side tunnel that I hadn't noticed before now, but I can still see the bouncing beam of his flashlight.
"Turn your light off," I say again and click mine off. "I want to try something."
"Fine, whatever," he says and then his light vanishes.
And that was the first time in my life I knew what dark really was. It's when you can't tell whether your eyes are opened or closed, it's when the difference between them being opened or closed doesn't even matter. It's when you can wave your hand in front of your face and not notice a thing.
It's when somebody could be standing right behind you and unless you heard them, you'd have no idea. You wouldn't know they were there, until it was too late, until a filthy hand shot out and clamped over your mouth, until a rusty knife pressed into your kidney, and you were dropped down onto the floor of a filthy tunnel, murdered for your shoes by a subterranean, sub-human nightmare that scuttled about blindly in the dark, feeding on trash and rats and--
A flashlight flicks on. Not mine. Kyle's.
"I can't keep doing that," he says. He doesn't sound quite as cocky as before. "It's too goddamn weird."
"Yeah," I say. "It's really weird."
I turn my own light on and point it in his direction. I don't think he realizes that his free hand is holding the butt of Dad's holstered revolver.
Somewhere off in the dark distance, a low, whistling sound echoes through the tunnel.
"What do you think that is?" Kyle asks.
"No idea," I say. "Maybe we'll find out when we keep going. Come on."
He looks at me for a long moment before he takes his hand away from his belt.
We keep going.
Ahead of us, the subway station rises into view. It's in pretty bad shape. The concrete is cracked and broken all across the platform, and there's a big chunk that looks like it fell right out of the ceiling above. A quick sweep of my flashlight confirms this suspicion.
"Jesus Christ," Kyle says. "You wouldn't want to be standing here when that shit comes down." He moves up to it and prods the chunk with the toe of his shoe. "That'd crush you flat."
"I guess that's why the road collapses sometimes," I say. "Everything down here's just crumbling to dust. The whole city block might cave in if they're not careful."
"It won't come to that," Kyle says. "Somebody will come down here and fill the whole thing in with concrete."
"How do you know that?" I argue. "Are you a city planner?"
He shines his flashlight in my eyes. "No," he says, "but that's what'll happen. Why wouldn't it?"
"It'd take too much concrete," I say.
"What are you, some kind of concrete expert?" he says and smirks.
"Shut up," I say.
There's an edge to our banter that I never noticed before. We're both anxious, both well aware that we've come further than we ever thought we would. How much further are we going to go? I don't know. I don't know how far this tunnel goes or what's waiting for us at the end. Maybe we'll find an opening and an escape back into daylight?
Or will it just be a dead end, a concrete barrier erected to keep idiot explorers like us from getting trapped down in the dark? I try to imagine what it will be like, to come up to that dead end and realize that the only way out is back the way we came.
I realize with a terrible jolt that I don't know how old the batteries are in my flashlight. How much time do we have left? The beam looks a little dimmer than I remember when we first got here.
Shit.
"Hey, maybe we should turn back," I say. "I think my light's running out."
No answer.
"Kyle?"
I sweep my light across the subway platform and spot my brother. He's approaching the far corner, where a section of wall caved in to reveal another tunnel beyond it.
"Kyle, what the hell?"
"That sound we heard," he says. "I think it's coming from over here. And, goddamn, it's hotter than hell over here. Come take a look."
I turn my head and look back down at the subway tracks and the old tunnel and the way back into the world above. I think about my fading flashlight. I think about how dark it is.
"Goddamnit. " I pick my way across the rubble on the platform and follow my brother.
He's shining his light on another graffiti message. It's scrawled next to the collapsed section of wall and it's so badly faded that it takes me a moment to decipher it.
"The Devil lives here," I read aloud. "Well, that sounds nice, doesn't it?" I look at my brother. "Now can we get the hell out of here?"
"In a sec," he says. "I just want to check this out. I think there's another room back here."
"Kyle," I say.
But he doesn't hear me or else doesn't care. My brother climbs over the remains of the broken wall and into the tunnel. After a moment, I follow him.
As I put my hands on the stone, I notice that it's a lot warmer here than the rest of the tunnel. Too warm, in fact; now I'm really sweating under my t-shirt. Everything feels hot and sticky and damp.
"Like climbing into Hell," I mutter to myself.
The tunnel beyond the collapsed wall is only about three feet high. If I want to go any further, it'll be on my hands and knees.
"Oh, hell no," I say, but I can see Kyle's light, twenty or thirty feet ahead. "Goddamnit," I say again.
I try not to think about I'm crawling through. I really, really hope it's just mud.
"There's a room up here," Kyle calls. His voice echoes from all around me.
I try not to think of how many feet of concrete and stone are above my head right now. I try not to think about how hot it is, how it grows hotter with each filthy step.
I reach the end of the tunnel. There's enough space for me to stand, which is a small relief, but one that goes mostly unnoticed compared to the overwhelming heat. Kyle doesn't seem to notice. The long, low, gusty whistle is louder than ever. This must be it.
"Check it out," he says and points again with his flashlight to reveal the source of the heat and the noise.
"A steam pipe," I say. "A broken steam pipe."
The object of our grand adventure is just a hunk of rusted metal sticking out of a concrete wall. Some of the bolts look like they've been blown off. Every few seconds, a long plume of steam jets out and fills the far corner of the room.
"That's really awesome," I say. "So this is where the devil lives. Can we go now?"
The flashlight in my hand has almost faded completely at this point.
"Shit," I say and shake it. Something rattles around inside but the light doesn't brighten.
"Kyle, how's your light?" I ask. "Mine's just about out."
No answer.
I turn to look at him, but with my dim light, I can barely make out his face. I can tell that he's looking at something in the corner of the room.
His mouth is pressed together in a tight, frightened line and his hand is on his belt.
I look towards the direction of his light.
A man is sitting against the wall. Sitting and staring back at us.
At least, I think it's a man. It's hard to tell, at first glance. The hair is wild and long and tangled, with a beard to match, and he's wearing a pile of clothing that resembles a rotting heap of shirts and jackets. His eyes are open and look too bright in the dark.
"Oh shit," Kyle says in a quiet voice.
"Oh shit," I agree.
Nobody moves. Not Kyle, not me, not the filthy man in the corner.
"Okay, okay," I say, "let's just get out of here. Let's just go, right now."
I put my hand on Kyle's arm, the one that's holding the flashlight. I glance back at the man. "Look, we're leaving. We're going. Sorry for disturbing you."
The man doesn't speak. Just continues to stare at us. Just remains right where he is, propped up against the wall.
"Kyle," I say. "Let's go."
He finally turns to look at me. His face is frightened. "Yeah, okay," he says. "We're going."
A scraping noise brings our attention back to the corner. Kyle's light jerks wildly for a moment before he regains control of it.
The man has climbed to his feet. Now he's standing there, arms dangling limply under the weight of his burly collection of dirty clothes.
"Jesus fucking Christ!" Kyle yells. He sounds almost hysterical.
"Let's go, let's go," I say, trying to find my way back into the tunnel behind me without taking my eyes off the man. But I realize with a sinking feeling that it's so narrow and cramped that if he's going to chase us, there's no way we can outrun him. Not until we get back to the subway platform.
I try not to think about what happens to people like us, down here in the dark.
Trapped down here in the world below with people like this.
The man takes an unsteady step towards us and that's when everything falls apart.
"Get the fuck down!" Kyle's voice is high and tight. "Get the fuck down right now!" I feel his arm move, not the arm holding the unsteady flashlight, but the other one, his right arm. The one that's right above Dad's holster and Dad's .44 caliber. I catch a glimpse of my brother's arm as he inexpertly draws the revolver and points both it and the flashlight at the dirty man.
"Get the fuck back down!" Kyle orders. "Sit your ass down on the ground right now!"
For some strange reason, I think of the pathetic little pocket knife I brought with me. I don't know why.
For a moment, nobody moves, except for another blast from the broken steam pipe. We look at the man. The man looks at us.
"Please just sit down," I say quietly.
He takes another wobbly step. The stench rising off him is overpowering, a mixture of spoiled food and booze and something sickly-sweet, something chemical. I don't know. Is he a junkie? Is he high? I don't know.
I look at my brother, scared and shaking and holding a gun that isn't his, not yet.
"Kyle," I start to say to him, my hand still on his arm, and then the man starts forward, faster than either of us could have ever expected, and Kyle's voice, shrill in the darkness is the only thing I hear for the briefest moment before the gun in his hand goes off and fills the world with a blinding flash and an even more deafening noise.
The second shot is even louder and brighter. By the third, my head is already throbbing.
I don't see or hear anything else for a long time.
An eternity later, my vision starts to clear a little bit, though my ears are still ringing. Distantly, I can hear the repeated click-click-click of the hammer striking an empty chamber as Kyle keeps pulling the trigger. But he's empty.
I don't look over at the corner of the room where the man was standing.
I don't look at anything, except the expression on my brother's face.
I gently pull the gun out of his shaking hand. The metal feels hot against my skin. With my other hand, I guide him back towards the tunnel behind us and pull him behind me.
lead the way back out to the platform, although my light finally dies out halfway through. Kyle's light works well enough, though it, too, begins to fade not long after we climb out of the cramped tunnel. It'll last us long enough, though.
It will. It has to.
We don't speak until either of us have made it back out to the aqueduct. We emerge from the darkness of the old subway tunnel, into the fading light of the late summer evening.
We don't laugh. We don't share in any of the stories of our adventure. We don't even look at one another until after we've made it all the way back to the safety of my truck, looking so lonely and forlorn in the empty parking lot.
Finally, once the door slams shut, we look at each other. My brother's eyes are red and haunted. His face is streaked with mud. He looks like the veteran of a war.
"Okay," I say. "It's okay."
"No," my brother says. "No, it's not."
Neither of us speak again the rest of the way home.
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1 comment:
Wow, really love the way you write, but I am not sure about that ending either. It almost feels like it wasn't finished. Very exciting the whole way through, and then its just over. Thanks for the read though! I needed a mini bedtime story. Keep it up! =)
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