“I got it, too. Let’s just do this together. Sonar’s saying this chamber is oval in shape, pretty damn big. It drops down one-hundred-fifty feet below us and shoots up another two hundred. Let’s get the lay of it, look around, take some readings. Then we’ll get the hell out of Dodge.”

Murphy relaxed a bit.

The sound of Bell’s voice reminded him that he was not alone.

They followed the curving wall for some time until they came back to the tunnel mouth. The chamber was roughly 300 feet in diameter, resembling a huge shaft or chimney. Like the outside of the city, the walls both above and below were honeycombed. But these were not entrances, but oval cells, about eight feet in diameter. Perfect size for one of the bogies, they both realized, but did not mention the fact. They examined about fifteen or twenty of them and there was nothing in them but silt and marine growths. They were abandoned and had been for a long time.

They dropped down fifty feet, went up fifty more. There was nothing to see but those glossy black machined walls and the cells. Murphy didn’t like the chambers in the least. They were like the hollows in the carapace of an insect.

Funny, the stuff you would start thinking about in a situation like this. The darkness. The claustrophobia. That palpable sense of menace. It stirred things up in him, made him remember forgotten childhood fears and secret, nameless terrors. He was suddenly a kid again, back in Haymarket, the little dead-end burg he’d grown up in Wisconsin. There had been a nice girl in his class named Sarah Burges and she disappeared on Halloween night when he was nine-years-old. They looked for her for weeks. The entire town was in an uproar. People were fearing for the worst, that some child molester was on the prowl.

The sheriff enacted an after-dark curfew and had cars out all night long, shining spotlights in vacant lots and alleys and deserted playgrounds. The atmosphere in Haymarket was tense and scary. Then they dragged a local quarry and discovered her body. They said she must have fallen in. There were no signs of foul play or molestation.

Murphy had been terrified by it all, as a lot of kids were. Rumors ran wild that she was thrown in there—what the hell would she have been doing out at a quarry outside town when she was walking home from a Halloween party? But nothing was ever proven. The curfew remained in effect for weeks. He remembered lying in bed at night, imagining her down at the bottom of the quarry in her ragged, graying nurse’s costume, her face puckered, slimy things crawling over her, her mouth packed with dead leaves and mud.

Why the hell am I thinking about that? he wondered. Here. Of all places. I haven’t thought about that shit in twenty years.