Harrogate rose by faults and ledges, the torch in his teeth. He hung by his nails from a seam in the rock, he peered out with a cautious eye. A spray of pine needles stirred against the depthless blue. A lizard scuttled, a bird. He listened. Beyond the drone of insects and the sound of the wind he thought he heard distant traffic but he was not sure. He made his way back down to the floor of the vault and squatted there tapping his fingers against his knee, the shaft of light terminating in the top of his head without apparent pain or power of inspiration.
He unfolded from his pocket the damp and thumblacked map of the city whereon he’d traced with grocer’s crayon deadreckoned reaches, corrected tangents, notes on distance. He held the light above his head and fastened down a mark with his finger.
Shit if I know where I’m at, he said to the silence.
Am at, said a soft stone echo.
He folded his chart and rose. He studied the pale thin probe from the outer world and he finally climbed up and stopped the hole with his rolled map.
He never found it from the outside. After wandering about for days he came back and took the map down again. He’d brought some oily rags filched from a can at the gas station on Henley Street and he lit these in the chamber and went out. All day he looked along the edge of the city and down by the river and anywhere he could see or hope to see a pine tree. He began to suspect some dimensional displacement in these descents to the underworld, some disparity unaccountable between the above and the below. He destroyed his charts and began again.
That year there were locusts. They howled in the green trees like panthers, struggled in their fallen hundreds on the river’s face.
He fell listless and enervated from histoplasmosis.
He feared in the lightless depths great rats, beveltoothed and bare of tail, spiders hairy or naked or lightly downed or partly bald, rope-shaped reptiles, their fangs, their tuningfork tongues. Their memberless economy of design. Bats hung in clusters like bunches of dark and furry fruit and the incessant drip of water echoed everywhere through the spelaean dark like dull chimes. In the pools lay salamanders cold and prone and motionless as terracotta figurines.
The matches that he struck periodically to test the air burned with an acetylene blue and he’d watch the flame draw down the matchstem and wink out and the darkness would hood him almost audibly. Sitting there with his thumb on the button of the flashlight and listening until the terror rose up in his throat and then pushing the button and creating again the filthy basilica in which he sat, the batclotted arches, the high amorphous convolutions of limestone from which scum dripped. Gray sewage percolating down through faults and bedding planes. Dark leachings from the city’s undersides and speleothems accresced out of some grim slime quietly oozing in the dark.
Harrogate stepping from pool to pool of blue sludge in a tunnel where the light of his torch found trace of human work. A few old timbers black with rot, a bucket, a bone. He turned the bone in his hand, inspecting the minute chamfering of miceteeth, vermiculate scrimshaw, the brown and corallike fluting of the marrowed bore. Wherein lay a slick millipede. He dropped it clattering on the rock. The millipede ran like a train. He retrieved the bone and looked it over, holding it for size against various parts of his anatomy. Bet me, he said softly. They’s somebody down here murdered.
He loaded it into a hindpocket and set forth again, his light in one hand and a clawhammer in the other, the channel narrowing, turning. A region of old timbers crossed with chalk, boards laid over the wet red clay of the cave’s floor.
He was brought up by a wooden wall against which the corridor terminated neat and flush. Harrogate studied this barricade with his flashlight and he studied the wet stone ceiling and the walls. With the hammer he prized away a chunk of pulpy wood until he got the board levered up. He took it in both hands, dropping the hammer, the flashlight in his armpit illuminating odd points above his head. The board gave with a gradual springy feeling and fell at his feet. He trained the flashlight on the place. Behind the boards was a wall of solid concrete. Knotty grain and the marks of a circlesaw in the masonry. He set the claws of the hammer under the next board and pried it up and ripped it away. With the hammer he went tapping across the face of the barricade listening. The tapping went down the chamber and returned. He sat in a pile of slag and studied what to do. And were they walling in or walling out? He tapped at the empty rubber toecap of his outsize sneaker with the hammer. After a while he raised his head. Dynamite, he said.
The times that Suttree called on him now he found him deeper yet in his plottings, frowning over his charts, composing campaigns to entrap the phantoms with which he was beset.