In a group of our size, discussion did not last long before someone sprung to action. Two choices remained: follow or defy. Precious Ruby flew into the depths of the opaque hole. No doubt farther than we’d ever gone. One of the only warnings we’d ever received in the days before Marley died came from Officer Bricket about that very tunnel.

“It’s filthy and filled with rodents and shit. Actual shit,” he’d said. “If you go too far, you’re stuck in a maze. Don’t screw around in there, you hear me?”

Marley snickered at him.

“Marls, look me in the eye and say you aren’t going to go in there.”

“I won’t, Dad.”

“Look at me and promise!”

She ran across the room and pressed her nose to his, grabbing his cheeks with her flour-covered hands. We were in the middle of baking her melatonin cookies. “I promise!”

Of course, we’d already been in the tunnel long before that moment—years before—finding most of what he said to be true. It was dank with a smell that lived up to its fame. To prove my loyalty, I got tasked with the investigation. On my hands and knees, I crawled through the hole. Several feet in, it dropped off into a walkway. I did not step down into it, only confirmed its existence. The edge of the entrance served us fine, although I’d always figured Marley hid her best scavenger hunt clues deep inside there, knowing we wouldn’t enter again.

Officer Bricket’s warning came after a dead body was found somewhere deep in the workings of the tunnel system. A homeless man had stumbled upon him and ran out of the hole screaming. The dead man’s eyes were in his outstretched hands. They said he looked like he was reaching for something above him. Nothing of a nature that gruesomely strange had happened before or since, and they ruled it as an accidental death by drug consumption.

There were no memorials for that stiff-armed corpse with his hands to the gods. No paintings. Not even a wooden cross hammered into the dry dirt of the bowl.