Ben Winters - World of Trouble

Some idiot part of me was expecting to find a hum of activity. A rogue government scientist in a white coat barking out orders. Last-minute preparations for launch. Beeping consoles and screens filled with maps, a world beneath the world, humming along, preparing for action. Something from James Bond, something from Star Wars. Something .

But it’s nothing. Cold; darkness; a bad stink; spiderwebs and dirt. Under the staircase there’s a cheap wooden door, hanging open to a tiny room: fuse boxes; mops; a black potbellied furnace, silent and rusted.

Where are the people ? Where are my buddies Sailor and Tick and Delighted, where are the brilliant revolutionaries, vanguard of the future? Where have the spiders scuttled off to?

Cortez, for his part, seems unfazed. He turns to me in the strange wavering light of the headlamps, and his spooky excited grin is still in place. His face looks chopped up and put back together.

“Who knows?” he says, reading my mind. “Maybe they went out for milk.”

My eyes are slowly adjusting to the dimness. I look up and down the hallway.

“Okay,” I say. “How do you want to do this?”

“We’ll split up.”

“What?

I turn back sharply to him and our two pools of light form together and I see that his eyes are wide and flashing. There’s definitely something going on with him, I saw it up at the top of the steps, some new eagerness coming to life in his head, taking center stage.

“I’ll go thisaway,” he says, like the sheriff in a Western, pokes his thumb off into the darkness and starts moving.

“No,” I say. “Wait. What? Cortez.”

“Just holler. Just do Marco Polo. Don’t worry.”

Don’t worry? “Cortez?”

This is insane. I stumble after him but he’s moving fast, swallowed up in the surrounding darkness. He’s got some plan, he’s following some star that I can’t see. A wash of panic rushes up from my stomach, a rush of fear, deep anxiety, as old as childhood. I don’t want to be down here alone.

“Cortez?”

I take big careful steps along the gray floor, my back pressed against the rough concrete, my light bobbling in front of me like I’m an anglerfish. My gun is in my right hand. Eyes seeking, trying to adjust. Walking through a shadowland, through a photographer’s negative, shining the light. A few bulbs dangle bare and functionless from the ceiling, among a tangle of sagging, rusted pipes. A bare stone floor, uneven, cracked in long lines across the foundation. Spiderwebs and spiders.

The layout of the police station basement appears much like the layout upstairs, a single long hallway broken by doors. There are just fewer of the doors down here, spaced farther apart. It’s like this world down here is the corpse version of the world upstairs, the decaying mirror image of what’s above. Like the building died and was buried down here, underground.

Somewhere down the hall I hear the creak of a door, a footstep: steel boot heel on concrete. Another footstep and then a quiet rustle of laughter.

I whisper sharply. “Cortez?”

No answer. Was that him? The door creaks again, or maybe a different door. I turn slow, 360 degrees, watch my semicircle of light bobble across the darkness, but it doesn’t find him. What was he laughing at? What’s funny? I don’t know if he’s still somewhere in the hallway, on the far end of it hidden in shadow, or if he’s slipped through one of the doors.

There’s a scratching sound, above my head, something small up there, tiny claws scrabbling over the rusted interiors of the pipes. I stand for a long moment, as if at attention, listening to the mouse or mole or whatever it is, feeling each of my heartbeats like a whoosh of air in a bellows, feeling a flush of fever in my face. Maybe it’s a function of having lost so much weight—of being so tired—but I can, I can feel it, each individual heartbeat, every second passing.

All in all I’m counting only three doors, clustered together at the end of the hall. Two up ahead on my left, one just to my right. I shake my head, press my fingers into my eyelids. Three doors, three rooms. Doors and rooms. All I have to do down here is what I did up there, go down the line, search each room, clear each one, check them off, one at a time.

They’re even labeled. The door directly next to me on the right says GENERAL STORE in big spray-painted letters, bright red. On the other side of the hall, the closer of the two doors says LADIES, same paint, same color. The one next to it should say GENTLEMEN, but instead it has no words, just a graffiti depiction of male genitalia in bright blue paint. Sophomoric; charmless; bizarre in the context. This little masterpiece I presume to be what Cortez was laughing at, but it doesn’t look like it’s that room he chose to enter—it’s the door marked GENERAL STORE that’s slightly ajar. I peer through it and say, “Marco,” and he doesn’t answer and for a second I can see it vividly in my mind, Cortez in there, taken by surprise, his throat sliced open, red blood spilling out, writhing on the floor, blood spurting from the terrible wound.

“Polo,” he says, indistinct and distant. I exhale.

I shake my head. Where are the people? Maybe one of these doors leads to another hallway, another exit; another staircase, leading farther down. Maybe they came down here and disappeared, dissolved into patches of dust or shadows.

The door marked LADIES is locked. I rattle the handle. Bedrooms? Women’s bunks? I press the door with two flat hands, find it to be flimsy, just pine or pressboard. Eminently breakable, calling to be kicked down. I take a deep breath and prepare to kick in the door, and while I’m suspended there, between intention and action, another memory crowds in: my mother, a couple of years before she was murdered, she said this beautiful thing to me about how your life was a house that God had built for you, and He knew what was in each room but you didn’t—and behind every door there was a discovery to be made, and some rooms were full of treasure and some with trash but all the rooms were of God’s design—and at this point, these many years later, I have to wonder if it isn’t more accurate to say that life is a series of trap doors, and you fall through them, one by one, tumbling down and down and down, one hole to the next.

I raise my gun up to chest height, like a real old-fashioned policeman, and kick open the door marked LADIES. It flies open and cracks against the wall, ricochets back against my shoulder and cracks into the wall a second time, and my light looks in on a room full of corpses.

It takes time. To get the whole picture, it takes some time. Investigating a pitch-black room with a headlamp, what you get is a mosaic picture, like shaking puzzle pieces one by one out of the box. You turn your head and suddenly the light fills with a man’s face, scruffy beard, features slack, eyes staring straight ahead. Turn your head again, the light moves, and there’s an arm in a dress shirt, sleeves rolled up, fingers curled, inches from the plastic Flintstones cup that’s rolled away from the hand.

My light moves through the room, seeing one thing at a time.

In the center of the room there is a small square card table with cups and saucers on it. There are dead bodies seated around it as if for tea. A man with a long ugly face and a buzz cut, head back and to the side, like he’s fallen asleep on the crosstown bus. One of his hands dangling down to his right, the other hand on the table, fingers interlaced with the fingers of the girl next to him. This is Tick, then, and the girl whose hand he is holding is Valentine—African American, very dark skinned, long arms. She has fallen forward and her cheek is flat on the tabletop, a line of fluid running from the corner of her mouth like a spiderweb.