Crude Sunlight 1 (2 page)

The tree still stood, closer perhaps than it had ever been, a heavy looking branch emerging ponderously from its trunk, close enough to the surface that I could have surged up and grabbed it if I had been treading water beneath. I stepped out into the water, arms crossed over my chest, resisting the cold that goose-pimpled my skin. Pale sunlight broke through the cloud cover to occasionally warm me, to transfigure the water around me from a dull gray green to warmer tones of brown.

When the water reached my ribs I let myself fall forwards and began to swim with tense, rapid breast strokes, heart pounding, losing contact with the muddy floor. I ducked my head under the surface and swam like a frog through the green murk. My head broke surface, I gasped for air and saw that I was still far from my goal. Experimentally, I straightened and tried to touch bottom; my foot penetrated a zone of numbing cold, as distinct from the warm layer above as if drawn with a razor. I yanked my foot up with a gasp, and ducked under once more, to gaze into the depths.

The sun broke free as I did so, so that the water near the surface blazed from dull to emerald green, vivid and dusty, gradating softly down into darkness. I hung suspended, and stared into the velvet black that massed below, a void without light, without warmth, depthless and old, conscious of my presence as I hung before it. I sensed something within it, something looking up at me from the bottom of the reservoir, something inimical to me and mine, and all thought of reaching the tree fled my mind as I turned and surged back towards the shore in a blind panic.

When my feet once more found purchase in the tusseted muck, I rose, breathing heavily, and saw that nobody had noticed my frantic swim towards the shore. My father was rooting around in the cooler with stiff, annoyed motions, while my mother sat in the car, smoking a cigarette and gazing away. I stood shivering, knee deep in water, and realized that I couldn't talk to either of them about the darkness. Instead, I emerged and took up my towel, wrapped myself in it and sat down on the grass, water running down my face, gazing out at the tree that stood miraculously alone in the reservoir's center.

Thomas sat back and closed his eyes, reached up to pinch the brow of his nose. Of course he remembered those summers. The stupid trips their parents had insisted they take to spend time together, which, as far as he could remember, hadn't been particularly fun for anybody. He tried to remember Henry, tried to remember this tree that seemed to have been so important to him, and drew only a blank. It had been so long ago.

A couple of chirpy beeps announced that the computer was ready. A password prompt. Thomas paused, fingers frozen an inch above the keys. Password. Hesitating, he moved the mouse over to the question mark button and clicked it. A little beige box opened up, saying,
Hint: I am.

I am?
What sort of hint was that? He'd hoped for something like date of birth or mother's maiden name, but no luck. Clicking on the password box, he typed
Therefore I think
. He pressed Enter. Nothing. He typed
Henry
. Again, nothing. He stared at the hint.
I am.
He had no idea.

He knew that he should be thinking about how much storage space he would need, but he couldn't rouse the enthusiasm. He opened the desk drawers and rifled through their contents. Textbooks, folders, wads of paper, random pens, loose change, a pair of shades, CDs and more. Perhaps he should go through it methodically, sniff out more information, but he felt restless. With a pang he regretted not having brought Buck; he would have attacked this problem with an energy and enthusiasm, which in turn would have galvanized Thomas. As it was, he felt uneasy, listless, subdued. What was Michelle up to, he wondered. Was she thinking of him?

He could feel a large and all-consuming funk coming on, the sort of hellishly introspective mindset that could swallow him for the rest of the night, so instead he stood and walked over to the couch. He sat down heavily. It was comfortable, he decided, despite the metal framework that he could feel through the cushions. Leaning forward, he picked up the remote control and turned on the television.

A blue screen snapped into life.
What, another password?
he wondered in annoyance, and then realized that it was the video channel. Curious, he shifted around and dug out another controller. VCR. He examined it quickly, then pointed it at the Video Player and pressed Play.

The blue screen vanished, replaced by something that had obviously been shot on a handheld camcorder. It was dark, nighttime, outside some massive building that loomed vaguely in the near distance before the camera. The sound of nervous breathing filled the apartment with a hoarse roar, and Thomas jackknifed forward to lower the volume as Henry spoke, "C'mon, hurry up!"

Chapter 2

Henry. He was holding the camera. The voice had come as if from behind Thomas' shoulder, and before he could help it he was on the edge of the couch. Several people dressed in black were leaning a massive ladder against a tall wire fence. Someone muttered something, and another laughed. The chain link fence sagged under the ladder's weight, and then somebody was going up, scaling it like a monkey. Henry turned the camera quickly, showing some trees looming up in the darkness, the lights of the city all around, tall buildings, all of it blurred in this quick check before he focused once more on the ladder.

The first guy had reached the top, swung his legs over, and was now dropping down, grabbing handholds of the diamonds in the wire mesh, the fence chattering and clinking till he dropped from halfway to the grass below. The second figure was already at the top and the third was at the base of the ladder, looking up.

"Okay, here we go," whispered Henry, and stepped up to the ladder. The angle swung up, and suddenly Thomas was looking up at the third person's ass as they climbed up quietly.

"Nice ass," said Henry, eliciting an amused chuckle from above.
Julia
, he thought. Then Henry was going up, mounting each rung quickly. The screen whipped around violently as he reached the top and dropped the camera to the waiting hands of someone below. It was caught, steadying, fumbled around and then aimed at Henry as he dropped down onto the grass.

Henry's face, right there, staring out of the TV screen at Thomas. He looked excited, eyes wide, a black hood falling back off his head, exposing his tousled mop of black hair. He reached up, pulled the hood down and then grabbed the camera. The point of view swung around, and then they were running, ladder abandoned. The massive building loomed high above them, looking like a fort, a castle, something improbably old and European. The terse, quick breathing of people running. Someone made a joke, people laughed, were hushed. Finally they reached the building's base, lined up against the wall, and the camera panned up and across.

It truly was huge. Made of brick, thick-walled with tall, narrow windows that were choked full of broken glass behind the wire mesh that covered them. Two huge towers rose into the night like the horns of a gazelle, their points capped with verdigrised copper, gleaming eerily in the moonlight.

"C'mon, it's around here somewhere," somebody said, quiet and authoritative. The group moved along the base of the building, walking quietly in single file for about a minute till they rounded a corner and stopped before a huge crack in the wall. It was as if someone had pulled a seam apart, had burst open the bricks so that it gaped, empty and dark like a wound in the side of the building.

The camera focused on the interior but it was too dark within to make anything out. Quiet whisperings, and then everybody drew flashlights. One by one they slipped inside and one of the guys whispered a warning about pigeon shit, something about gas. Henry went last, and then the flashlights were switched on, their broad bright discs swarming across the walls, ceiling, floor. The room was large, empty, the wallpaper bulging with fist sized cysts, the pattern long faded and leached of color by washes of filthy water that had stained it to brown. Crown moldings topped off the walls, giving the place an air of regal desolation.

There were more excited whispers, and then one of them turned to the camera, holding the light beneath her chin, illuminating her face from below as if she were around a campfire and about to tell a ghost story.

Julia
, thought Thomas again,
definitely
. Her face was brilliantly lit, the base of her chin, the underside of her nose, the under swellings of her cheeks, her brow and forehead glowing an incandescent whitepink. The rest dimmed to darkness, but her lips were pulled back in an ironic smile, and Thomas saw that she wasn't beautiful, not exactly, but instead incredibly striking, her hair cut short almost like a boy's, her features sharp and betraying a certain harshness. She smiled and then turned back to the darkness.

They moved through the room, shoes crackling on the detritus strewn across the floor, and out into a large hallway. It had the look of a hospital, the corridor wide and box shaped, long and lined with doors. An old hospital, from the looks of it, with the moldings around the doors artfully done in dark wood. It looked damned spooky, Thomas decided, sitting back and shaking his head. There was no way that he'd ever go in there.

Some of this must have been felt by Henry and his companions, for they quieted and began to file down the corridor, the sound of their feet loud in the echoing silence. There were a few old leather and wood wheelchairs abandoned in the hallway, large clunky devices that must have been at least fifty years old. They paused before them and whispered comments to each other, snapped off a few photographs. They paused before each door, flashing their lights inside, seeing little more than broken glass, random pieces of furniture knocked down and destroyed, the walls covered by mostly obscene or drug-related suggestions in spray painted letters.

The end of the corridor opened into a shoebox-shaped hall with a staircase on one end and a large arched entrance leading out into a dark room beyond. They paused, discussed options and as one turned toward the steps. They stopped at the head of the stairs and flashed their lights down into the depths, examining the dim corridor visible far below.

"Eric, what do you think?" asked Henry.

A young man with curly hair the color of beaten bronze turned to look at the camera. "We go down. That's where the steam tunnels are; they lead out under the other wings."

"Well, all right then. Saddle up, guys." Eric nodded and turned to stare down the stairwell. He seemed about to say something further when a loud shuddering sound echoed up from below, like a heavy object being jerked across the floor, something ponderous like a wardrobe or desk. They froze, looked at each other.

"What the hell was that?" Julia, tense, but not frightened.

"A bear?" The third guy, face as-yet unseen. The camera suddenly yawned, whipped around, and the guy let out a yelp of protest as Henry did something to him, the others laughing uneasily, tension broken. The camera swung up to show Eric moving slowly down the stairs, straining to see what might be moving below.

"Hold on guys," said Henry. "I'm going to put in a new tape." Eric looked up, face serious, pensive, and then the film crackled and cut to the blue screen of the video channel.

Thomas blinked and rose to his feet. His heart was beating strongly and without thinking he raised the remote and pressed Rewind. For a second nothing, and then, as if in protest, the whirring sound of the tape rewinding, picking up speed. Thomas waited for five seconds and then pressed Play. A clunk from the VCR, and the image kicked back in. They emerged once more into the shoebox-shaped hall, panned around, focused on the steps. Dialogue, and then as they prepared to go down, that sound.

Thomas paused the tape, causing the image to freeze, two bands of white crinkly chaos appearing across the screen, frozen in overlay. He rewound, pressed play, listened to it again. What was that? Had there been somebody else down there? Henry must have made it back out if the tape were here in the VCR. What had they found below? Had they made it into the other wings? Thomas suddenly wished Michelle were there with him, wondered what she would have made of the tape. Standing, Thomas rounded the low table and crouched before the VCR. There were a number of blank tapes in a shoebox to one side of the TV, each of them numbered in red pen. Ejecting the tape, Thomas saw that it was number 7. A quick rummage of the tapes in the box showed that there was no number 8.

Rising to his feet, Thomas walked into the bedroom and looked down at the photographs. Rustling through them, he picked up the one taken in the tunnel and flipped it over.
Steam tunnels under State Hospital.
He turned it again and stared at the figure in the distance that was running away into the darkness. Was that Eric? Julia? Somebody else they had found down there? He set the photograph aside, and sat on the edge of the bed, pushing photographs back as they began to slide down the indentation his weight had made in the mattress, and picked one up at random.

A view of a mist-wreathed garden through a broken window. A quick flip showed that it wasn't the Hospital. A second: an ornate staircase curving around a hallway, filled with weeds and plants that had grown up the steps and the floor of the hall to the height of a man's chest. Checked, Thomas stared. An interior garden? Then he saw the broken windows. No, a ruin. Another: A dark hallway, a wheelchair sitting by itself against a background of splotchy, scabrous wallpaper. Thomas flipped it:
Nov. 17, 2:52am, Ground floor of State Hospital.

Frowning, Thomas compared the times of that and the tunnel shot. The photograph of the figure fleeing had been taken nearly fifty minutes after. It had taken the crew about five minutes after the wheelchairs to reach the stairwell and go down. That meant they were in the tunnels or wherever they led for over an hour. Thomas made a face and sat back.
An hour down there.
He shook his head slowly in amazement.